Nerd Journal: MM in the Kitchen and a Progressive Dinner, Part 1: Chicken-Pancetta Sausage

I love the holidays! I'm away from Nerdworld and back with my peeps in my native climes. I am socializing like crazy, because as soon as I go back to campus for the spring term, I'll be in nerd-exile and near-solitary confinement again.

Carpe diem and all that, right? So last night, the Cine-Sib, Il Barista, La Parisienne, and I got together to make a gorgeous dinner together, with the cooking being as much fun as the eating. So . . . I am food-blogging, one post per dish.

First things first: Il Barista and I decided to try our hand at homemade sausage -- with a recipe of our own invention. Here's the process and the product!

We decided to make a chicken sausage using about a pound and half of chicken breast (i.e., 3 boneless, skinless chicken breasts cut into large dice). A good sausage needs a bit of fat in it, so we included half a pound of diced pancetta. We then added kosher salt, freshly ground black pepper, chopped basil and parsley. Next: chill the entire mixture and then grind it up (we used the grinder attachment on Il Barista's beloved Kitchen-Aid stand mixer). The result:

Now came the rather nasty bit: stuffing the sausage mix into natural casings. I didn't bother taking a photo of the casings themselves because the long, slimy strands were -- frankly -- disgusting. Run water through them to clean them, and they puff out into bumpy coils of membrane.

"EW, YUCK!" La Parisienne and I yelled. "They look like alien guts! Barista, YOU can do this part; we're going to the living room to watch Supernatural DVDs." (The chivalrous response: "WUSSES!") All of us ended up working together with the Kitchen-Aid to fill the casings, and we finished with this:

From this, it was an easy matter to make the long sausage rope into individual links. Don't they look lovely? They look darn near professionally done, don't they?

Well, then there's nothing left to do but cook the sausages to a golden brown state of deliciousness and eat them all up!

So how good were they? Il Barista and I looked at each other across the table, grinned, and agreed: "We still have it. We're awesome!"