I know, I know, it’s been a while since I last posted waaaaaay back in March. Sorry, things all of sudden became very busy with our sausage business. It was right about then Cheryl and I were applying to local farmers markets for the summer. As delicious as they are, the sausages don’t sell themselves! We ended up being in FOUR markets over the summer and sold 2,385 lbs of sausage from mid-May to mid-October. That’s a lot of wurst. Try as I might, blogging became a tad difficult to keep up with. Someone had to make all those sausages! That someone was me, by the way. Entrepreneurship at its finest.
How did it go? Very well. Our product was extremely well received in all of the markets which was very encouraging for a market newbie like us. We developed a following and it will be interesting to see if our customers continue ordering during the off-season. We learned a lot this summer and I have definitely become quite efficient at cranking out the sausages in order to keep the inventory up for the markets. Seeing people’s reactions when they tasted our samples made me very happy. Definitely have a good product and look forward to building the business.
Anyway, now that things have slowed down a bit I find I once again have time to cook and so, will turn one again to tending to my little piece of internet real estate. It has been soooooo nice to be able to cook dinners again. The first week after the markets ended I cooked FOUR nights in a row. Felt good.
We are well into autumn and as you might remember, it is my favorite time to be in the kitchen. Here’s a great dish I made one night for Cheryl with some smoked boudin (straight from NOLA courtesy of our friends Monique and Stephen). Being fall, I thought this particular boudin would be delicious sautéed with some apples and acorn squash.
Now, boudin form New Orleans is much more delicate than a regular pork sausage and needs to be cooked a little but more tenderly (it is also quite different from French boudin but we’re not going into that right now). The meat is usually cooked then ground and mixed together with rice then stuffed into a casing. Since the mixture is already cooked you don’t really need to ‘cook’ the sausage but you still need to cook it since the casing hasn’t been cooked. Thus, a delicate poaching can suffice. At least that’s what I did. Probably did it wrong but hey, it turned out fine.
For this dish I browned up some shallots, apples, and chunks of acorn squash, then added some apple cider and tucked the boudin in, simmering gently. In about 10 minutes it was ready to be spooned over some creamy and cheesy polenta. Pretty good autumn dish to help mark the end of farmer market season, no?
Sorry I don’t have the recipe here for you this week. I’m still getting back into the swing of things and to be honest, the wordpress platform has changed around a bit so I have to re-learn things. Suffice it to say this week I am just glad to be able to share my chronicles of our food and travel lives with you once again!
The Roaming GastroGnome 