Cooking Adventures: Homemade Sausage & Pesto

This past weekend my ten year old daughter and I had a lot of fun creating delicious meals within our kitchen.

A few days before, I’d told her stories about how my mother (her grandmother) had my brother and me help her make sausage and  stuff the sausage casings. Initially it was fun, but after a few hours of stuffing sausage we had enough. 😉

My daughter was so fascinated with my sausage making stories, that I told her we could make some so she could sample. I’ve made it before, but I didn’t tell her it was homemade. Saturday morning, we didn’t have too much planned so I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to introduce her to the  awesomeness of homemade sausage.

My daughter loves helping in the kitchen and it’s yet another way we spend hanging out together. We truly enjoy each others company.

I gave her the task of grinding up herbs and spices; sage fresh from the garden, sea salt, peppercorns and habanero pepper.  These were all added to our granite mortar and she dutifully ground everything into a fine powder using the pestle.

Tok, tok tok… is the sound the pestle makes as it grinds the ingredients within the mortar. We like that sound.

Once everything had been ground… I had her mix the freshly ground spices/herbs with ground pork. To truly make everything homemade, we’d have ground the pork too. But that would mean I’d have to pull out the manual meat grinder and I’d have had to purchase regular pork.  We used pre-ground pork but perhaps next time I’ll show her how to manually grind pork?

Now that the sausage prep was complete, the only thing left was to cook the sausage! I had her prepare them, while I made pesto.

My daughter loved the homemade sausage and declared that she doesn’t want to eat store purchased sausage again. She said, “Mommy, the store bought sausage doesn’t taste as great as what we make at home!”

I have made homemade sausage before and it’s never lasted long! Perhaps the next time we prepare sausage, I’ll purchase sausage casings so we can stuff the sausage.

I’m guessing my photo of pesto should have had it’s own post. There were so many herbs/spices that went into this dish. The aroma filled the room while I crushed the dry herbs and spices together. Once all the dry ingredients were ground into a fine powder. I added the ‘wet ingredients’ to the mortar, and my pestle  went to work again. The pesto was used as a topping for zucchini pasta and it was delicious!