Sausages

Are you old enough to remembeer the little dog on "That's Life?"
This isn't about that.

Our friend Shirley had contacted us some weeks ago to say that her latest porkers were due to be slaughtered, and would we like our usual half pig.    Of course we said yes.

They were booked in for last Tuesday, but with all the recent events, Shirley wasn't sure whether the abbatoir would be able to keep the appointment.  In the end, they were done, and we arranged to collect on Friday.

I hadn't been out since Tuesday (when we moved the chickens),  and it was about collecting supplies,  so it seened like a good idea.      It seemed less of a good idea on the way home when the motorway ground to a halt.

At east I'd be able to prove that I'd genuinely been collecting supplies... all they'd have to do was to look in the boot and see the trotter sticking out of the box (that's Shirley's trademark way of boxing the four primaries/. And thank goodness we get her to cut it into primaries,   a complete half pig wouldn't fit in my boot, and I chuckled as I imagined what the driver behind me wold be thinking.

I got home, via the Vet as I had to pick up some prescription items for Izzy.  We processed the pork on Friday afternoon, but didn't do anything particularly interesting or new (i'm just not in the right frame of mind to be dealing with curing ham or salami, or whatever.).

DH wanted to make lots of sausages, so we did.    We'd ordered some seasoning mix and some fresh casings.  We usually have Weschenfelder's Cumberland mix, but  they's dold out.  So instead we had "Gold", which we've had before,  and "Yorkshire", which we hadn't.     DH made the sausages on Saturday,  and there were loads of them.   He made "sausage pie" for dinner,  and both mixes tasted really good.

He's going to make bacon,  using loin this time.  After our little, ahem, incident with the cardboard smoker last time we made bacon,  I bought a proper metal smoker and we haven't actually used it yet.