If you harvest your own prickly ash berries (Xanthoxylum/Szechuan peppercorns) sausage should be on your list of things to make. I love the bright, citrusy flavor and gentle numbing quality that prickly ash adds to a dish, but it can be difficult to incorporate them into foods and have them taste coherent if you’re not…
Sausage
Blood sausage.
I pride myself on my skill making sausage, and you'll find lots of different recipes here. If you're new to this site, check out the ramp sausage for a fun cased sausage.
Scrapple
Do you like bacon? Pancakes? Crispy, browned things cooked on a griddle? Maple syrup? Of course you do, so fasten your seatbelt and come aboard Alan’s organ train, because we’re traveling to scrapple country. if you like offal, shoot, even if you don’t partake in the finer parts (sucks air through teeth) if you’ve never…
Venison Braunshweiger Dumplings
I’m always looking out for interesting ways to serve liver to people that don’t think they like offal, and these traditional German dumplings are a great way to do that. Liver and kidneys, especially from ruminants like deer, lamb and goat, are some of the hardest to get people to like, and alot of times…
Wild Rice Blood Sausage
Black pudding, mutura, kaszanka, boudin rouge, zungenwurst, blutvurst, biroldo, morcilla, sanguinaccio. Across cultures, historical preparations for blood sausage will be found just about anywhere animals are harvested. And those are just sausage, don’t even get me started on the legion of other sanguine-devoted cultural specialties. Like most meat eaters, I love homemade sausage, and, once…
Fried Blood Sausage and Potatoes
I’m proud of the fact that I make my own blood sausage from lambs on the farm I harvest myself. It’s a process that’s pretty intimate, and not available to everyone, and from there, people that harvest their own animals probably don’t harvest the blood, so it’s a special sort of circumstances that have to…
Chicken Blood Sausage
I love cooking with blood. It’s hard to come by though, so that usually means it’s a once-a-year thing when I might help someone butcher a few lamb. I typically get enough for about 15 pounds of sausage out of that, which is plenty for me, and leaves enough so that I can donate some…
Lotus Root Confit Stuffed with Sausage
Funky water tubers with their air-channels stuffed with sausage is my favorite go-to recipe with lotus root confit. The air channels are basically begging to be stuffed, and although you’ll need commercial, and not wild lotus root, unless you got some huge pond monster. It’s a great way to use these funky things, especially if…
Puffball Mushroom Bratwurst
Here’s a fun way to use meat, and dried mushroom powder, specifically puffballs. In charcuterie and sausage making, milk powder is often used, especially in finely ground emulsions like bologna and hot dogs to achieve a nice, bouncy texture. Here, instead of using milk powder in the sausages, I use toasted, dried puffball powder, which…
Smoked Heart Sausage
A while ago I was planning the menu for a dinner revolving around lamb, which was going to take the shape of 3 separate courses dedicated to the animal. The first course in a menu like that I usually like to include offal, to convey the importance of whole animal butchery and how creative you…
Venison Breakfast Sausage with Wild Blueberries
Looking in the freezer I had sausage on my mind. Seeing a couple bags of wild blueberries I remembered a moment of fear I had one day picking berries in a remote spot, and seeing a picture one of my friends posted about bears being seen harvesting berries in the area I was in. I…
Bergamot Italian Sausage
I try to remember to dry as much stuff as I can to use during the Winter, which if you live in the Midwest you know can mean a lot of time in doors fighting cabin fever and looking for things to do. Inevitably I usually have plenty of bergamot (Monarda fistulosa) every year since…
Peacock Neck Sausage
American culture has a predilection for looking at exotic food from safe distances. We want to watch shows about eating bugs and snakes, but the majority of us would balk if someone tried to feed them to us. We’re fascinated by foods we deem strange, but that fascination is strictly for the value of the…
Orrechiette Alla Barese, with Wild Mustard Greens
When I discovered some wild rapini recently, this was the first thing they were destined to be in. If you’re familiar with Italian cuisine, you may have heard of the dish; If you’re Italian American you definitely have. Orrechiette alla Barese translates to “little ears in the style of Bari”. It’s a cornerstone of…