Charcuterie

The gentleman builder is not only a builder, an artist and a bladesmith; he's also a food lover.  He adores fine food - organic spinach with homegrown eggs, 85% cocoa chocolate and fresh meat are high on his list of favourites.

The gentleman builder has great plans for the block in terms of a mixed farm business that will mean that we can get a bit of cash from selling cows, sheep, goats and pigs and, to a certain degree, pick the markets when they are high to sell our produce at a premium. We aim to obtain organic certification for the farm and have not used chemicals since we purchased the property in 2005.  We will have a mixture of poultry too - ducks and chooks are a given and we're still negotiating on geese (I'm happy to have geese as long as they are not kept too close to the house and they're honking and hissing is not at all appealing to me).  In fact, chooks will be first on our list of stock purchases when we move in to the block as the family eats a lot of eggs and there's nothing quite like fresh, organic eggs!

Anyway, back to the story at hand.  The gentleman builder is not a fussy eater (he married one, though) but has a real soft spot for good quality, fresh food.  I bought him a couple of books from the Book Depository at some point about preserving meats as he had spoken at length about his plans to butcher (or have butchered) a portion of our livestock once we're set up for such things so he can have a meat freezer stocked with delicious meaty treats.  Being a vegetarian, I cannot share his enthusiasm for this particular pursuit but I support him in eating quality food that is free from chemicals and, considering our children are also keen carnivores, I think it is a great idea to take advantage of the beautiful meat we will grow.  Organic, grass fed produce is pretty difficult to find and has many health benefits over produce grown on grain.

The gentleman builder sourced some natural casings, purchased some meat and dug out the mincer my Mum had handed down to me.  He then set about making his own sausages.  

Meat

Sausages

Through the process Padawan and Little Miss learnt the value of sausages.  The whole process took over an hour and the sausages lasted about a week, rationed out.  The kids beg the gentleman builder to make sausages on a fairly regular occurrence and whine incessantly when the response is "when we are living at the block we will have more time for things like that again".