Daddy would you like some Sausage?

I never thought Tom Green was very funny, but the bit he did in the movie Freddy Got Fingered was, in a twisted way, very funny.

In my current situation, I'm not sure if I'm in sausage heaven, or if someone is trying to kill me via sausage. Three days ago this showed up:

This is a cured batch of beef sausage with hot peppers, garlic, and basic seasonings (mainly salt & pepper). It is hanging on the clothes line in the back yard. Since it has peppers, no bugs mess with it. This represents the second sausage blessing/threat in the past week. The previous batch was uncured and included some standard sausage that we pan fried and got fat on.

Then yesterday this happens:

This time, more sausage. Third time in a week. This is fresh with an even better quality of beef. It, too, is now hanging in the same spot on the clothes line. I'm not afraid to say it: That's some beautiful sausage right there.

They made about 660 lbs of sausage before Christmas, and apparently they make and sell 250-300 lbs of sausage in the average week. That is a lot of sausage. It doesn't look like I'm going to get to help make sausage while I'm here. They make the filling on Monday's and fill the casings on Tuesday's. We have some paperwork we have to do next week, and the following week we fly out.

We do swing by the shop every couple days while we're going around town. Here's another piece of meat porn, real smoked bacon, not the chemically smoked stuff you see in most stores:

If you're not buying bacon like this, you're only cheating yourself.

Making a hot pepper hotter

We grow a few types of peppers at home. Generally we'll grow jalapeno, serrano, and habanero. Jenifer's dad grows one pepper, and it's this bad boy:

I'm still working on getting the English name for it because it has a nice flavor, and I'd like to grow it. The heat level when picked fresh isn't as high as a habanero, but it does have some kick to it, probably a little under a serrano level. The flavor is different from any pepper I've ever had. It is a little difficult to tell, but this little bush is covered in little green peppers.

Eating these peppers fresh or cooking with them creates a nice flavor. What I didn't realize is how much more potent the pepper can be if it's aged in olive oil for a while. Holy crap. This stuff will light you up, so you have to be careful with how much you use:

You can see in the jar on the left a clove of garlic towards the top. Generally it's garlic, olive oil, and as many peppers as you can fit in the jar. I had some from the one on the right, and was too generous in my portion. My face almost re-configured itself.

Despite this firey experience, I like this idea as another way to preserve peppers. We don't eat much in the way of fresh peppers because Jenifer doesn't like spicy food, so most peppers get dried, and tossed in something here and again. Now I have another way bring heat to a weekday dinner, and being that it's in oil, it makes the heat linger quite a bit longer.