Day of Food

Every few weeks, I try to spend a day (or at least six-eight hours) cooking food. Today, the second rainy weekend day of the fall, was a perfect day, seeing as I spend the *first* rainy weekend day of the fall on the couch, knitting.

I had a few things planned-- sausages and ice cream-- but there were a few new things, too!

The first thing I started were the sausages:

Apple-Cinnamon-Nutmeg Sausages

1 1/2 lb. pork loin
2 oz. pork fat
1 tbsp. kosher salt
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
1 tbsp. cinnamon
1/2 c. apple, minced
casings

I followed the directions here, essentially, to make these sausages. They're sitting in the fridge right now, waiting to be cooked for dinner tomorrow. We'll see how they turn out!

As the sausages take a few hours all together (between each major step, you have to re-freeze your meat), I made goat cheese in between sausage steps, following the directions here, at Urban Cheesecraft-- for those of you who were living with me this summer, this is where I bought my cheese kit from. I didn't realise that the curds had, in fact, separated from the whey, because they were so tiny! A few hours of straining later, though, I have a really pretty chunk of goat cheese. I plan to split it in half and make half of it honey-and-lavender (we had this at Harley
Farms a few months ago, and it was delicious), and make the other half garlic-and-herb.

Once the sausages and the cheese were done, it was clearly time to make ice cream. Housemate Brianna had wanted earl grey and lavender ice cream, so that's what I made-- following the recipe for vanilla ice cream in Ad Hoc, and substituting looseleaf earl grey and lavender for the vanilla. It, too, is not quite done, but should be deeeeelicious.

Then, it was 9:45, and I made dinner...

...a package of tortellini from Safeway.