Unexpected Sausage

As I've mentioned before, I had two goals during the summer of 2010: bread and cheese. I also had a goal for summer 2011: sausage.

In the fall of 2009, just before Halloween, I discovered El Salchichero at the Scotts Valley Farmer's Market. One of the first thing I bought from them was their chestnut crepinettes. They came two to a package, so I cooked them, cut them into quarters, and served them at a Halloween dinner for eight. It was a rather loud night-- we were watching movies, talking about costumes, and answering the door for trick-or-treaters. But as our guests ate, silence fell. Thankfully, it was the good kind of oh-my-god-how-delicious-is-this silence. By the end of the night, we had been converted to the absolutely amazing sausage-making skills of Chris LaVeque, the man who owns and runs El Salchichero.

The sausage stall became a regular stop for me on my farmer's market rounds, especially once they started carrying whole cuts of meat, lard, and, occasionally, rabbits. I was continually amazed by the creativity shown in the week's offerings: they changed with the seasons, using locally-available produce, and were, without fail, the best sausages (and crepinettes!) I've ever tasted.

Then, in July, Chris folded up his farmer's market stall in order to remodel an old t-shirt factory into a butcher's shop. While I tried to make my stock of sausage last, it was too delicious not to eat. I was left in a quandary: did I want to go back to eating grocery store sausage (both New Leaf and Scotts Valley Market make their own), or did I want to start my next summer's goal a little early? In early September, armed with a KitchenAid stand mixer and attachments, I made my first sausage: a fairly simple breakfast sausage.


To be quite honest, it wasn't great. Neither was my next try-- spiced apple sausages. In both cases, the sausages ended up dry and bursting from their casings. Eventually, I picked up a copy of Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn's Charcuterie.

Ah, I realised after following their instructions (slightly modified) for Andouille sausage, this is it. I'd finally gotten the proper fat/meat/salt/seasonings ratio. The andouille became a Thanksgiving Day appetizer, and hung around in the freezer long after, becoming breakfast and dinner (I'm fairly sure I have a few links still). It was followed by garlic and herb sausage, mild Italian sausage (Christmas Eve lasagna!), and, most recently, sausage made with ras el hanout.

So, thank you, Chris LaVeque and El Salchichero-- oddly, thank you for closing, however temporarily. I am very happy to have discovered a love of sausage-making. I am also extremely excited about the fact that El Salchichero's new face (local butcher's shop!!) is opening this Friday. I'll see you there.

DDC IN THE FUTURE: Adventures in cheese-land

Instead of New Year's resolutions in 2010, I made two summer resolutions: I would learn how to bake bread, and I would learn to make my own cheese. In pursuit of bread, I made a lot of focaccia, soda bread, pizza dough, and biscuits-- nothing I'd really count as a proper loaf (unlike my housemate Brianna, who has become quite adept at the whole bread thing).

Cheese, on the other hand...

I started making cheese in August, almost missing the end of summer. While on vacation up in Oregon, I picked up a ricotta and mozzarella kit from Powell's, put together by the fine people at Urban Cheesecraft. In it were cheese salt, rennet tablets, citric acid, good-quality cheesecloth, and an incredibly adorable (and accurate) thermometer. I quickly set about making mozzarella and ricotta, having a great time doing it-- there have been a few times I've made a "ground-up" pizza, with home-made crust, sauce, and cheese-- but I decided I wanted to go a bit further.

This fall, I started making my own goat cheese. While the results weren't always perfect (the feta that turned out as cream cheese-- delicious cream cheese!-- for example), it's something that I really enjoy being able to do. This winter at a craft fair, I brought home-made goat cheeses as my treat to share. The still-in-waiting scrambled eggs DDC post has goat cheese as an ingredient. I love the flexibility of soft goat cheese, the way they can be sweet (with honey and lavender) or savory (with shallot jam). I will eat it with just about anything.

Making cheese can be amazingly easy: a batch of goat cheese takes me no more than an hour and a half, if I'm focused. Ricotta is even simpler, and the hardest part of mozzarella for me is dealing with the hot curds when you're stretching them.

In mid-December, I moaned about the lack of local cheddar when making shepherd's pie. This, in part, led me to do the totally sane thing: pick up a copy of Home Cheese Making, a SRS cheese mold, and two gallons of Strauss farms whole milk. Twenty-four hours after I started it, I have a pound (or so) of farmhouse cheddar hanging out in my kitchen, developing a hard coating. In a few days, I'm going to cover it with wax, and by the end of February, I'll have my very own, pretty darn local cheese (not counting the cultures, rennet, or cheese salt). I hope it works.

Grocery Shopping and Me

I've always had an interesting relationship with grocery shopping.

For most of my early twenties, I did the majority of my shopping at Safeway (or, when I lived in Ireland, at Tesco's)-- I ate what was cheap, because I was a college student on a budget. I tried to shop at Shopper's Corner once a month, as my "splurge." Essentially, I ate a lot of pasta, a lot of boxed macaroni and cheese, and a lot of rice-with-things-in.

Now that I have a real job! With a real paycheck!, one of the things I like being able to spend money on is food. I shop at New Leaf (which is also where my younger brother works!), I shop at our local farmer's markets (there are about nine million of them), I will goddamn shop at El Salchichero when it opens. I still shop at Shopper's Corner-- they've got the best butcher's corner in town, as far as I know, as they actually process much of their meat on-site, meaning that I can totally special-order some pork fat from them later this year to make more sausages. Occasionally, guiltily, I shop at Whole Foods.

Usually, this combination leads to pretty good meals, with the more-than-occasional stop at my old stand-by of boxed macaroni and cheese. I make spaghetti, stew, tuna-noodle casserole, crepes, and burritos. I make lemony chicken with peas and rice.

Sometimes, though, things go wrong, and occasionally, this combination of markets leads to interesting purchases... such as this weekend, when I returned from the Scotts Valley and Santa Cruz farmer's markets with five pounds of beef bones and a pound of stew meat from TLC Ranch (which, I was very sad to learn, is closing! I've really loved their meat over the last few years, and will miss them quite a lot), some cippolini onions and a flat of just over-ripe heirloom tomatoes from Happy Boy Farms, and some pesto focaccia from Beckman's Bakery. Nothing, you will notice, that makes a complete meal without some work (although tomato-based beef stew with cippolini onions would taste really good!), which led to last night's dinner (Burger King) and tonight's (housemate's very tasty japanese curry).

Tomorrow, though, there will be lasagna (from the Moosewood cookbook, but with the addition of some ground beef, because NOM) made with some of the tomatoes. Later this winter, I'll be able to cook beef stew with the broth I made yesterday from the bones (and some locally-sourced carrots, onions, and leeks), and spaghetti with the orangey tomato paste I made yesterday. In between, there will be knitting, a craft fair, and Thanksgiving break (oh, how I long!)

It's been a long day.