We harvest ducks and chickens and deer…and this year we were gifted a wild turkey. The animals and fowl not appropriate for eating in large chunks we save for sausage making. This year, sausage time fell just after I filed an appeal brief in a murder case. Seemed timely.

We save sausage making for days when we have nothing better to do and the snow is deep enough to provide clean coldness. Keeps the mix from getting too warm and “breaking”. Who wants broken sausage?!? Fair warning: the next photo is of Michael grinding meat cubes. Nothing identifiable, but even so…

We (meaning Michael) hauled The Monster up from the basement so our children could make venison hamburger. We kept it upstairs for sausage season. At 80 pounds, it isn’t anything I want to be schlepping up and down stairs more than absolutely necessary. It is a dream for grinding meat. And potatoes. And onions. And garlic. And anything else that makes sausage tasty.

We invested in an industrial scale stuffing machine. Given that we will make about a hundred pounds of sausage this season, it was a wise investment. We like it. A lot.

We started our sausage adventure with chicken bratwurst. We had two roosters too many this past season. We will enjoy the eight pounds of brats this summer. Great grilled. We also saved the hearts and gizzards of our broiler harvest. We never remember to thaw them for Thanksgiving stuffing, and it seems not everyone appreciates the chewiness they lend. Sausage making allows us to use the parts that would otherwise go to waste…and have people enjoy the experience.

Onions go into brats and potato sausage, but garlic is the driving force in kielbasa. Neither Michael nor I shot a deer this year, but we kept everyone else’s hearts and ended up with eight pounds of venison-pork kielbasa. We used a wild turkey breast and leg we were gifted by a guy we let hunt our land. It made some of the best kielbasa I’ve ever had. We may need to take up turkey hunting ourselves.

We use our cabin as an auxiliary refrigerator. It is too cold to keep the actual refrigerator operational, but insulated enough not to be a freezer. We appreciate the additional space.

I dice 20% of the potatoes that go into potato sausage to keep it visually and texturally interesting. The other 80% goes through The Monster with the meat. This year, all potato sausage is made from our old ducks. Gracie, one of our original flock, died several days ago. She is not in the sausage. We have two Khaki Campbells left from the initial cohort. We miss Gracie and Arthur, our favorite ducks. We decided we couldn’t keep all our ducks when our eggs cost $23/dozen to produce. We still don’t harvest as many old ducks as we should…. Good thing we are doing this for fun and not profit.

Hanging the sausage allows them to dry before packaging, reducing problems ice creates in storage. I didn’t get any photos of the smoker this year. The kielbasa are smoked, as are half the potato sausage. We will make about 100 pounds of sausage in four days. It is a series of early mornings and late nights.

We sample the sausage set aside when a casing splits or from the tail end of a squeeze. There is always something left. These confirm the end product is worth the work. Hot dogs and bologna were the only types of sausages I knew about growing up. Bratwurst were a revelation. Kielbasa a dream. Potato sausage otherworldly. My house smells like an old time deli/meat market. I ache all over and am tired to my bones, but my freezer is full and my heart is happy. Now I just have to convince our friends to make the trek and come for dinner!