Pork sausages

10 m pig small intestines  prepared for sausages (ask your local butcher)

5 kg pork meat (muscle)

500g fatback (raw subcutaneous pig fat)

300 g garlic

alspice

salt (about 1 level teaspoon/kg mixture)

1 spoon olive oil

1 cup water

Grind the meat. Cut the fatback in  tiny cubes (1/2 cm) and mix it with the meat. Peel and crush the garlic cloves with a garlic press, add the quantity of salt you need for you sausage mixture, add a spoon of olive oil and mix it with a pestle or the back of a soup spoon until smooth, add water and mix. Add the garlic mixture to the meat. Add spice to taste. Fill the intestines with the sausage mixture, using the special device of the meat grinding machine. Hang sausages on a stick in cold place and leave them to dry for a few days. Sausages can be consumed fresh or they can be smoked or otherwise preserved and saved for later.

I am spending Christmas Holiday in Romania with my father and my daughter. This is the first Christmas here without my mother. Nothing is the same but Christmas is a time of joy. We will try to make all the Christmas preparations as my mother would and remember and relive the joy and excitement we always had this time of the year.

Up to a few years ago, my father used to buy a live pig and sacrifice it on the day of Ignat, 20 December, every year. The pig was skilfully butchered, and nearly every bit processed and used or preserved.

This year, for some reasons including financial crisis, and my father’s old age, we are not going to do that. However Christmas will not be the same without home made sausages so we bought some pork meat and I made sausages for the first time in my life. The recipe in the next post!

Christmas is the time for sharing. The most important thing to share with the loved ones is quality time. Christmas is also the time to remember people who touched our lives one way or another, family and friends who are away, even people we had quarrels with and let go of hard feelings, let our hearts feel with love and send them Christmas cards. But we often forget that the Christmas Spirit is about remembering the less fortunate people too. Let’s try and invite the homeless man to warm up with a hot soup by the stove in our house (I know that can be risky) or at least let’s take the soup to where he is on the street; or make time to cook something delicious and share it with the elderly from a nursing home. Just do something to put a smile on a face! What are you going to do?