Have you ever been so intimidated to try making a certain thing in the kitchen that you put it off forever and a day. Then you finally work up the courage to try making it and are stunned to find it ridiculously easy? Such was the story with me and sausage a few years ago. I had made all sorts of food that makes people pause -cheesecakes, bread, homemade thises and thats- but I had always been just a bit scared of making sausage. I chalk this up to the time I spent in my teen and early adult years as a vegetarian. I had this little inferiority complex about my meat cooking skills. Then one day, we came into a windfall of pork shoulder and decided I didn't have much to lose since I had so very much pork lying around. I ground a couple of pounds of pork, added what I figured I liked best in sausage -fennel, garlic, crushed red pepper, salt, and black pepper- mixed it up with my hands, rolled it into little meatballs and fried them in a pan before building a marinara sauce around them. Holy wah. To say that all my sausage making fears were wiped away with one succulent little pan full of saucy, moist, garlicky, spicy, browned-to-perfection-then-simmered meatballs is putting it mildly. The homemade sausage was superior in every single way from texture to flavour. It was perfect. In fact, I was so bucked up by my success that I made fresh sausage and meals from said sausage five nights in a row. Then, although I was not nearly tired of the sausage, I was … {Read on...}
