Love through the stomach... » Bacon

Making sausage

Valerie — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 16:32:36 +0000

Frying up some home-made sausages.

I decided I needed to try to make my own sausages. My wonderful, wonderful butcher has some great sausages, but really, I wanted to give it a try. To add my own flavors, make my own combinations. It was one of those things I felt the need to try at least once.

Add seasoning before grinding, to make it easier to mix all flavors after grinding

Like many of the foods I feel the need to make, this – yet again – proved to be well worth the little bit of extra work.

The sausage casings needs to be washed before use

It doesn’t mean that I stop buy sausages from my butcher. But it does mean that along with the sausages, I might buy some random, cheaper cuts of meat and some pork intestines as well.

Grind the meat at a setting you like. Do you want chunky sausage, or really fine?

Making sausages is fun. It really is. It’s easy too and the finished product is tasty. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Mix and knead the ground meat to make sure all the flavors are well-distributed

Now the pictures you see here and the recipe that follows are a simple pork sausage with some French herbs. But as with most home-made foods, the key is to use your own imagination. To make combinations you think might be tasty. Have fun with it. I sure did!

The sausage stuffer.

There are a few things to take into consideration when making sausages.

You place the entire length of casing over the stuffer, then pull it off as you fill.

First: Make sure that you have a way to get the meat into the casing. A sausage stuffer attachment for a stand mixer is awesome, but any type of funnel should work.

Pull the casing off the stuffer as it's being filled.

Second: Any good butcher makes some of his own sausages. He’ll be able to sell you some casings.

Keep filling the casing into one giant sausage.

Third: Fat equals flavor and moisture. Completely lean sausage will taste terrible, so don’t shy away from fat.

Twist the casing to create individual sausage links.

Pork sausages with french herbs

Author: Valerie

Prep time: 45 mins

Cook time: 15 mins

Total time: 1 hour

Ingredients

about 350 grams of lean pork
about 150 grams of fatty pork (pork belly)
1 onion
2 cloves garlic
a generous amount of herbes de provence
salt and pepper to taste
1 pork intestine (or other type of sausage casing)

Instructions

Cut the pork in 1 inch cubes, dice the onion and cut up the garlic, place all in a bowl with a generous amount of herbes de provence and salt and pepper to taste.
Grind the meat together the herbs in a meat grinder. Knead the ground meat to make sure all seasoning and meats are well combined. Add onions and garlic before or after grinding, depending on whether you like larger pieces of onion in there or not.
Wash the sausage casing and place it on a sausage stuffer. Tie a knot on the end of the casing.
Push the meat mixture down the sausage stuffer while moving the casing along with the meat stuffing to create one long sausage.
Once all the meat is inside the casing, twist the sausage at your preferred length to make individual sausage links, then cut off the excess sausage casing.
Cook the sausage like you would do with a store-bought sausage. You can also freeze them.

Notes

You can vary endlessly with the types of seasoning and filling you use. Just make sure you do use a generous amount of fatty meat, so the sausage doesn’t dry out when you cook it.

A bowl of home-made sausage links.

Guanciale (pasta all’amatriciana)

Valerie — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 17:01:01 +0000

Guanciale, one of Italy's tastiest secrets.

If you’ve ever read this blog before and/or haven’t been hiding under a rock, you know that I love Italian delicacies. Unfortunately with the exception of prosciutto di Parma and Parmigiano and Pecorino, most Italian meats and cheeses are either hard to come by outside of Italy, or extremely expensive. Sure, knock-offs are widely available since Italian food has become immensely popular around the globe, but the true taste of Italy is hard to come by.

One of these delicacies is guanciale. Guanciale translates to ‘little cheeks’, but there’s nothing little about it – not in size, nor in flavor. Guanciale is a cheek though. It’s a pork cheek, cured and generously seasoned with amongst other spices, lots of black pepper. Guanciale looks a little like bacon, the consistency and taste however is much, much more delicate.

When we visited Milan last month I brought back a guanciale. I also brought two different sausages and a piece of speck, 3 different cheeses (large chunks) and 4 kilos of flour home with me, but today I’m writing about the guanciale.

Guanciale is for sale at every supermarket or butcher.

One side is heavily seasoned, the other side has the chewy (cleaned) skin.

Guanciale is the meat that’s traditionally used for pasta all’amatriciana and pasta alla carbonara. Or that’s what the internet likes me to believe. I absolutely adore guanciale, there is no way to describe it. If you like bacon (and really, who doesn’t) you’ll like guanciale. It’s better than bacon! And no, that’s not heresy, because really it’s just bacon with even more flavor.

The guanciale cut up in strips

The first thing I used my guanciale for (I got a whole piece, so it’s quite large) was for a 1-dish-meal version of Pasta all’Amatriciana. I hadn’t had time to buy groceries and my zucchini plant had shed it’s last fruit, I had guanciale, I had tomatoes, I had pasta and I figured it just had to do.
Do it did! The pasta was delicious, the guanciale gave it just the nice little different kick that you wouldn’t have had with bacon or another meat. It was the perfect way to inaugurate the food I’d smuggled* home!

Adding cheese into the pan before serving

Pasta all’Amatriciana (with extra veggies)

Recipe Type: main

Author: Valerie/Love through the stomach…

Prep time: 5 mins

Cook time: 15 mins

Total time: 20 mins

Serves: 2

This is a variation on the classic pasta all’Amatriciana adding more vegetables to make it a single-course main dish.

Ingredients

short pasta (penne, rigatoni, fussilli etc enough for 2 persons)
200 grams of guanciale (substitute bacon if you don’t have guanciale)
1 package of passata di pomodori (strained tomatoes)
1 or 2 small red chilis (to taste)
1 whole clove of garlic, peeled
1 medium zucchini
plenty of pecorino or parmigiano cheese
olive oil
some small fresh tomatoes (optional)

Instructions

Boil the pasta in plenty salted water.
Drizzle a skillet or heavy bottomed frying pan with a little olive oil, then add the guanciale or bacon, the chili(s) and the garlic and cook them on fairly low heat. You want the Guanciale to release some fat and the chili and garlic to release flavor, be careful not to brown them.
Dice the zucchini (remove the watery inner core) and add to pan. Once the garlic is brown, remove it. Depending on the lever of heat you like, you can either remove the chilis as well or leave them in (or cut them up with or without seeds).
Add the passata di pomodori (strained tomatoes) to the pan, enough to make the amount of sauce you like. I use about 2/3 of a cup.
Drain the pasta when al dente, then add to pan with sauce. If you have them, you can now add some diced fresh tomatoes to the pan as well. Mix well, remove from heat, add a generous amount of cheese, stir the cheese in and serve immediately.

The finished dish, delicious!

*Since I’m within the EU, it obviously wasn’t smuggling, but traveling with 4 kilo’s of white powder and very smelly (garlicy sausages, cheese) in my suitcase, it sortof felt like I did!

Pasta with spinach and chicken

Valerie — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 16:13:36 +0000

Once in a while, when we’re in a hurry, or busy, or working late, I’ll be lazy and prepare a store bought meal. The one I usually have laying around is a bag of frozen pasta/meat/veggie mix with sauce cubes. Sounds appetizing, no? They’re actually not even all that bad, as far as store bought meals go that is.

This is not that.

I had some spinach that needed to be finished, 2 chicken breasts, and some cream that was nearing it’s due date. I had thought to make a salad, but the weather turned on me and I figured I wanted something warm.

Now usually, as regular readers know, I do pasta as a primo, a first course, and have veggies and meat with the second course. A one course pasta meal is a rarity in this house, except for those pre-made dinners.

I just started boiling the pasta, fried some bacon and sauteed the chicken in the bacom grease. I added some mushrooms I still had left. Still figuring I would do two courses, I looked for a pasta sauce and found that I only had a little bit of pesto left. I decided to mix things up a bit. I added some cream to the chicken pan, cracked some pepper in there and then added the spinach to the pan. It hit me. I was making the frozen bagged dinner from scratch.

As the pasta was done, I drained it, mixed it in with the spinach and chicken and served it. It was much much better than the bagged version.

I’m sure I’ll still eat the frozen version once in a while. After all, we’re both busy with work and such and once in a while cooking just doesn’t fit into the schedule, no matter now much I like it. In the mean time I will add this homemade version to my repertoire.

Easy coq au vin

Valerie — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 09:28:59 +0000

Despite the fact that in the last 2 days the temperatures here have spiked up and I can’t think of anything but spring or summer dishes, I didn’t want to hold out on my coq au vin. I made this a couple of weeks ago, but forgot about the pictures, so I didn’t write about it.

Coq au vin, to me, is fall or winter food. It’s warm color and taste pulls you through the dreary cold evenings. So if you’re in the same climate as me, you might want to hold out on making this for a while. There are more climates in the world though. And some people don’t have such strong feelings about what kinds of food to eat in what weather.

There are tons of different recipes or methods for making coq au vin. The common denominator is red wine. Oh, and poultry. Officially rooster, but most people just use chicken. After all, it tastes like chicken, right?!

I actually use different ways of preparing coq au vin. Depending on what I have in my fridge I’ll make it differently. In this instance, I had 4 small chicken thighs, which are perfect to make coq au vin.

If you have chicken and a bottle of red wine (one that you are willing to drink as well!) you’re good to go. You’ll probably have stuff around your fridge or pantry to make it great. Here’s this version.

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Coq au vin (recipe for 2)

4 small chicken thighs , loose skin removed

oil, butter and/or lard for browning

bacon bits

onion

garlic

mushrooms

a bay leaf

some juniper berries

pepper and salt (I use pink himalayan salt)

1 to 1 1/2 cup of red wine

chicken broth

flour for dredging and binding

Chop your onion and mince your garlic. Melt enough butter/lard to coat a Dutch oven or other deep, heavy bottomed, lidded pan, drizzle in a little olive oil as well. Start cooking the bacon bits in the pan. Dredge the chicken legs with a little bit of flour and salt.

Fry the onion and garlic until it’s starting to look glassy, but not brown, then add the chicken. Turn frequently until the skin starts to brown a bit.

Add the mushrooms and cook them for a minute or two, they may get a little brown too (I use whole mushrooms, but you can chop them if you prefer) but not too much. Then pour in the red wine to partly cover the chicken. It doesn’t need to be fully covered, but if you’re not at least half way up the chicken, you need more wine. Add some juniper berries, some freshly ground black pepper and a bay leaf to the pan and let it simmer for a couple of minutes until the wine starts to reduce a slight bit. Add chicken broth to barely cover the chicken. You’ll be flipping the chicken once in a while so it’s okay if it’s not fully covered in liquid.

Put the lid on the pan and let it all simmer for about 20 minutes. Turn the chicken over and give it another 10 minutes, then remove the lid so the liquid can thicken a bit more and give it another 10 minutes.

Put some flour into a cup, add some of the cooking liquid and whisk until you get a flour paste. continue adding liquid until the flour mixture becomes a pourable consistency. Pour it into the pan, stir and let it all simmer for about 10 more minutes to bind and thicken the sauce. Note: Don’t start this process with too much flour, you can’t take it out anymore. If you want to thicken the sauce more, just let it simmer longer or repeat the flour thing a second time. Thickening is easy and gives/keeps your flavor. Thinning it our will have you lose a lot of the flavor. That’s sad!

Once the sauce is the desired consistency, serve your coq au vin with some mashed potatoes and green beans, or just in a deep dish with some crusty bread, or over sauerkraut mash. The possibilities are endless, and tasty!

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Stamppot (Dutch potato and veggie stew)

Valerie — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 17:12:48 +0000

We had walked around all day, in the rain. We had visited places and were tired and hungry. The perfect situation to eat stamppot. The traditional Dutch dinner – hearthy, warming, and pretty dang tasty too!

My cousin and her family and 2 friends visited Amsterdam for a day. They were on their way from Portland to Kenia and had a 23 hour stop in Amsterdam. Perfect for a visit.

It was their first time visiting Amsterdam, so we had things to do and see. Especially since their heritage is Dutch and they’d found the address where my cousin’s husband’s grandpa had lived before his parents moved their family to the other side of the world.

So we went to the airport, picked them up, went to their hotel and then into town.

We strolled around, visited a museum (Our Lord in the Attic – an example of Amsterdam’s tolerance). We took a canal boat tour around the city and then visited the house where their family left to the US from. My cousin’s 2 kids and her husband touched the door their (great) grandpa had used.

The weather was typically Dutch fall. It was dark and rainy. However, this didn’t stop us. After all, them being from the Pacific Northwest, they are used to terrible weather.

By the end of the afternoon everyone was tired. They’d been up for about 24 hours (including the flight over). We took a tram to our home, where everyone sat down (and used the computer) and I cooked.

I made three different types of stamppot: boerenkool, zuurkool and andijviestamppot. Everyone enjoyed the food and company. After dinner (and dessert) we walked them back to the tram and got soaked again due to a massive shower that lasted the length of the walk to the tram stop — stupid Murphy!

I’m so glad we got to spend time with family and friends. I loved showing them around my city and their heritage. I was excited to be hosting a dinner for 8 at my home.

Yesterday was a great day!

(We spent more time eating, talking and having fun than thinking about photography, so the picture portrayed here is made by M.Minderhoud, found on wikipedia, and the boerenkool was probably made by him/her as well!)

Recipes for stamppot will follow throughout the winter. Some have already been posted before.