Sausage

Sausage seasonings being mixed - we only use pure organic herbs and spices and sea salt.

 

Sausage being mixed

 

The results

 

Black Sausage Ingredients

 

Liverwurst getting ready to be made

There has been some confusion about the pig classes we are offering.  I think in being overly flexible about what we can do, it is confusing. Basically, we are offering our skills, pigs, and space for making all kinds of delicious traditional foods from a whole pig.  The particulars are all up to what someone wants.

A few years ago we started doing ALL of the butchering for our pigs, rather than field-dressing and bringing it to a butcher.  I liked having the whole process in our hands.  The meat tasted cleaner, we had a larger variation in types of sausage we could make, and we were able to be thriftier and more efficient with what we used.  It was empowering, and fun.  Friends gathered with us, and we all worked together, and laughed together, and we had so much great food afterwards.

Last year we decided we wanted to share this experience.  We tried to do a class having people come out and butcher a pig with us.  It went wrong in so many ways, and one of them was that the people who came to the class did not actually participate very much.  It was not how we had wanted it to be.  We wanted to be offering this food, this experience for people who do not have the opportunity to raise pig or process their own meat by hand to have the experience of community coming together purposefully, the gratitude of using all the parts of the animal, the pride of learning a skill that peasants around the world have made good use of for ages - to create fine foods out of raw nourishment.

We did not intend for it to be that we were just watched by an aloof crowd while we struggled under the work load.

We also realized we wanted to share more with the community.  We want to share how simple it is to make delicious and nourishing foods for yourself.

We were all standing around snacking on liverwurst and Pâté the other evening, and remarking on how incredibly lucky we are to eat so well.  "How much would something like this cost to buy at a store or restaurant?"  we wondered.  A lot.  More than we could afford, especially if it doesn't have any preservatives, MSG, or nasty ingredients, and the pork is raised right.  It's priceless.