Cooking enough for an army.

Maybe it's the time of year, or maybe it's just me being pregnant and knowing that in a few months I'm not going to want to do much cooking....but I have started putting together some freezer meals that can just be pulled out and cooked, or reheated.  I'm also making some to take up to a neighbor that has recently had her first child.  Pinterest is full of yummy recipes, and I am starting to re-organize my "food stuffs" board into categories like Poultry, Beef, Pork and Venison.  Today I am making Slow Cooker Kalua Pig which when done will give me several servings to eat, and to freeze!  This recipe is also from the Paleo diet if that matters to anyone.

We love sausage!

On Friday my husband got his first deer of the season.  Super exciting!  I did a post last year about dressing out our his deer.  This year we did it just the two of us, which was interesting because I'm 5 months pregnant, and his deer this year was a gut shot.  If you have ever dealt with a gut shot deer then you know how stinky it can be....and being pregnant with a super sniffer....I posted and laughed about it on Facebook.  Also new this year, instead of making burger out of the entire deer we I wanted some actual cuts, so I found a YouTube video on processing a deer which I am including because I really like the way this guy explains everything.

We kept the loin, tenderloins, ball roast and rump roast, the rest went into bags in a cooler to be put on ice till the next day.  It was almost 10pm when we finished with the carcass...fast forward to Saturday morning....after breakfast we cleared off the counters and got two stations set up for removing silver-skin and connective tissues.  My husband set his station up with a stool...I did tease him about making his pregnant wife stand, so he gave me the spot with the seat.  Such a sweetie.  It took us all day (it felt like all day) several hours to trim everything up, and about an hour more to grind it up.  Two pounds of ground went into a vac seal bag destined for chili, 2 lbs is in a bag in the fridge for the Bulk Venison Breakfast Sausage and 3 lbs is in another bag in the fridge for the Venison Summer Sausage

Because the summer sausage takes over 24 hours to make I am starting with that.  Well I was going to start with that!  Our deep freezer is nice and full of meat right now.  We went in with our neighbors and got 1/4 side of beef.  So I am using a pound of the hamburger for this recipe.  Course the packages we reiceved have two pounds per in the hamburger, so I will make something else with the extra pound, after it has thawed.  I got it out last night and left it in the fridge overnight, and it's still frozen solid....gonna leave it on the counter while I move on to the Breakfast Sausage....

My first step today was to put on my new apron...it's super cute, and lots of pockets!  Thank you Sharon over at MS Purses for whipping it up for me!  She makes purses mostly, but she is a very talented seamstress!!!!

Gotta protect that bump!

None of the components for the breakfast sausage are frozen so I can just dive right in!  I got the smallest package of pork that I could, but there was still more than I needed, I'm sure I will find something else to do with it....so gather your ingredients and lets get started!  I want to note that we opted to make a partial batch of the sausage until we know if we like it or not.  There is nothing worse than making something in bulk only to find out it's not that great!

Then measure out your ingredients....

And remove any jewelry then dig in with both hands, it's cold, but it's the best method.  I didn't get any pictures because my hands were covered in stuff....after you have it mixed you can use a scale or just eyeball it out into 1 lb packages.

 We didn't do a full recipe so we ended up with 2-2/3 lbs of breakfast sausage.  Two pounds got sealed up with my handy vacuum sealer!  I LOVE this thing!!!!!

The vacuum packages are headed to the freezer, and the leftover chunk is going to be made into biscuits and gravy soon!

The hamburger is FINALLY thawed out so I can now make the summer sausage.  We are doing a full recipe of this because it never lasts around our families.  So as always, gather everything you need.

Combine everything in a big bowl, I couldn't find my onion powder, so I used chopped onions and increased it to 2 teaspoons

dig in with your hands and get it all mixed up!

Once it is all combined you can start the sausage making process!

Divide it out, I chose to do 1 pound sausages

Form a log packing it as tightly as you can, then wrap with foil, shiny side in.  I like to give my ends a little twist to help pack the sausage even tighter,  don't twist too tight or you risk ripping the foil.  Then it goes in the fridge for 24 hours....

Once the 24 hours has passed you preheat the oven, and pierce the underside of the sausage and put them in a broiler rack, or in my case a large sheet pan with a wire rack on top, and they cook for an hour and a half...now is when I wish I could let y'all smell the wonderfulness!

We went to Cabela's today and saw the summer sausage casings, which is a bit too late for this batch, but maybe next time I can put it in a casing instead of foil.  Enjoy!

This is why you should plan ahead!

Last year we purchased a quarter of a cow.  I was sooo sure that we would go through that in a years time...well this last year has flown by and we still have quite a bit of meat in the deep freezer.  So I pulled the brisket out of the freezer because the sky is getting dark and it's gonna rain...so no grilling!  I found a recipe I wanted to try (click here) and I realized that making a brisket is an easy 24 hour process!  I used my microwave's defrost mode to get it started defrosting and gathered the rest of my ingredients.  I did not follow the recipe exactly, I substituted a lot of the seasonings.  I used onion powder, celery salt, Durango Hickory Smoked Salt, minced garlic and a secret ingredient.

Every recipe I read said to line the pan with foil, and I used three layers to make sure that cleanup would be easy.

< Meat goes in the pan

Then cover with liquid smoke >

and sprinkle on the rest of the seasonings.

then cover with foil and let it marinade overnight...the next day pour off the liquid smoke and add a few dashes of Worcestershire sauce. And by a few dashes I mean cover it with liquid.

This gets put in the oven at 250 for six hours, I cooked mine from 8:30am till 4pm, 7 1/2 hours total

The original recipe says to  pull the foil off, pour a bottle of BBQ sauce on it and bake it for another hour . But I didn't want BBQ, so I left it off and as I stated before, it was baking for over seven hours.

So yummy I couldn't stop tasting this!!!

I used the liquid that was left from baking it as a gravy, and served this delicious meat with mashed potatoes, corn and toast.

Enjoy!