Christmas Presents

Back to the UK for a late Christmas

This year Christmas was delayed by Cees’ slipped discs and so we didn’t manage to collect our Christmas presents until into January. A part of our trips to the UK is buying essential things like peppermint tea and marmite either not available or so expensive we would have to mortgage the house to get them here. I also bring back black pudding, sausages and an Indian takeaway. But this year I left without the sausages - why? I hear you ask - well my present to myself was a sausage stuffer. Why buy yourself Chanel no5 when you can have something practical?

My present to myself

This week pork was on offer in the supermarket and so it was now or never for the stuffer. I started looking up recipes and they were all a bit too exotic for my taste, what’s wrong with plain Walls’ sausages, nice and pink, not too meaty and bland – very bland.

In desperation I resorted to asking my friends who run a small holding in the Vendee and who run min-courses in self sufficiency skills. They sent me a recipe which also sounded rather exotic – do mace and nutmeg really go in sausages? I trust them, so I decided to try it.

At least they look like sausages

The ancient, noisy meat grinder was my first port of call, twice through the grinder and then I had to take a fist full of aspirin to get rid of the headache. No matter, I was on a mission. After the mixing I was advised to make a small patty, fry it up and taste it – not a bad idea and I was amazed it tasted like Walls’ sausages!

Now on to the sausage stuffer. After a bit of trial and error (read meat mix all over the place and Cees hiding in his room) I managed to get the stuffer to stuff the casings I had bought. And guess what, they actually looked like sausages, which did rather amaze me to be honest.

A real English breakfast

Everything needs to dry for a day or so and so the tasting of the Chazelle sausages couldn’t take place until this morning. What better breakfast can you imagine than bacon, eggs and English sausages? They were scrumptious!

The rest of the batch has gone into the freezer and I will never have to buy additive filled sausages on my trips to England again!