Meat

It's been a hot topic around our house lately.

It all started with Todd's antelope that he got last fall.  It's been in the freezer just waiting for us to do something with it.  That something was jerky and a few days later, sausage.

Todd did all the work.  He sliced the meat, whipped up the marinade, hauled out a smoker from his parents' house that he'd never used, then learned to use it...

Little chunks of antelope becoming jerky...

Isn't this just the perfect picture of a Wisconsinite?  A man with his Miller High Life, dogs, some meat on the grill, and all in shortsleeves in the dead of winter...

Next, Todd tackled fish.  He entered an ice fishing derby last weekend and, as a proud aside, he took second out of 624 fisherman! Here's a photo of his winning fish.  This fishy fetched him $400...!

Every fish he and his fishing buddy caught ended up on the smoker - except one that I pan fried for dinner.  We now have more smoked fish than we can shake a stick at.

Then came sausage.  Tucked away in a pile of "want to try soon" recipes stached on my kitchen counter is one for making your own sausage.  It's remarkably, amazingly simple.  I never would have thought homemade sausage could be so simple.  It sounds so daunting, doesn't it? Before seeing this recipe, I thought making sausage would involve a lot of grinding, squeezing, probably some casing...but this only involves grinding, which we can easily do with our KitchenAid.

Todd doing his thing... 

The KitchenAid doing its thing...

Look at that freshly ground meat...!

The spices were added after the first round of grinding, then it goes through the grinder one more time...

And...the finished project...several pounds of fresh, tasty, homemade sausage...

The antelope went from being frozen as whole pieces of meat to frozen sausage.  Fun!