Table Scraps

Okay, that’s not a scrap. It’s a big honkin’ sausage. Isn’t it pretty? Bill and John got together and made about ten pounds of this lovely breakfasty sort of sausage – delicious with sage and garlic and ginger and, of course, pork. And, well, there’s none left. So I can’t share.

That was on March 1st.

This one was the next morning. Yeah, there’s still snow, but if you look closely, you can definitely find some signs of spring….

Hello, Mr. Robin!

There were about four or five robins rooting around in the leaves, looking for bits of vines and twigs so they can build their nests BECAUSE IN THE MINDS OF ROBINS, IT’S SPRING, DARNIT!

What else…oh, yeah, Bill and Julia made some pasta…

Pasta dough is pretty dense. Sometimes it’s hard to cut through. Particularly when you’re nine. And kinda short.

They made sheets of pasta, and from those, Bill made a fabulous sausage and butternut ravioli.

It was really, really yummy.

Sorry, there’s none left. It was a few weeks ago, after all.

And here’s what we had for dinner on St. Patrick’s Day Eve. No, it’s not the traditional boiled corned beef and cabbage dinner.

We’re not huge fans of the boiled part.

And we don’t really celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, either. We simply look on it as a reminder to eat some brisket.

Bill picked up a couple of corned beef briskets at the grocery store, and then, instead of boiling them, he smoked them for a bunch of hours, til they’d reached an internal temperature of 150F, then braised them for another three hours, using some of our homemade, home-canned beef stock as the liquid.

He also used a BBQ rub on the briskets, and made a sauce.

Here’s the final product: