So, I realize in my last post I mentioned I would be trying some vegetarian meals now that Cliff is gone. Well, I haven’t followed through on that quite yet (but I definitely plan to tomorrow I swear!). Tonight, I decided to cook up some wild pig sausage that Cliff and I made.
I’ll start from the beginning….
Most of the cuts of meat in our freezer are pretty standard….but we decided to take a few pieces, grind them up, and make sausage. In order to successfully make the sausage, we had to add some extra fat to the mix. The wild pig is just too lean to attempt sausage patties out of it. So, we found some bacon bits (real bacon bits…not the salad stuff) and mixed it with the wild pig.
First, we ground up the bacon bits.
While grinding up the bacon, we mixed together some spices to add to the sausage mix. It was mostly chopped up fresh sage with some salt, pepper, and couple other spices.
Next, it was time to grind the wild pig meat.
Next, we mixed the ground bacon, wild boar, and herbs.
We made two versions of the sausage: one spicy and one sweet. “My” sausage was the sweeter one. We just added some maple syrup to it and mixed it up. For the spicy sausage, we added chili pepper flakes.
The result? Really delicious sausage! Even with the added bacon, you can tell it’s much leaner. But it was definitely comparable to store bought sausage! I loved it.
So, that was my “Project Pig” detour…just to give you some background information on tonight’s dinner.
On to tonight…I took out some frozen sweet sausage and decided to make a pasta dish with it.
After the sausage was cooked through, I added some spinach.
While the spinach and sausage were cooking…I heated up some marinara sauce and whole wheat penne pasta.
Finally, I mixed the sausage and spinach with the pasta.
Dinner was done! I sprinkled some mozzarella on the pasta and served!
This turned out so good! I had a feeling it might considering how good the sausage was alone. This could definitely be done with any lean sausage. Next time, I’d like to use more vegetables like mushrooms and carrots. I am really excited for the leftovers tomorrow! And I promise, there will be a vegetarian meal or two tomorrow as well! Happy eating!
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