One of my ten goals for 2010 was to learn how to make sausages. I’ll admit it was a bit of an easy one — the “make to-do” list item on your to-do list just so you can cross something off straight away — as I was already planning on attending a sausage making course in March. When March came along though, I was incredibly disappointed when we had to cancel our places a couple of days before the course – and delighted when Rachel, the course organiser, said they were running the course again a month later, and would we like to attend that instead?

The course took place on Saturday at Old Sleningford Farm – a lovely informal community/small holding near Ripon in North Yorkshire. The drive up showed off Yorkshire at its best – the sun shining on all the hills, dales and cute cottage-filled villages – and when we got there, the group were having a cup of tea in the sunshine next to the herb garden. There were five of us on the course, plus Rachel & Martin, who ran the session together.

Once the tea was supped, we headed into the purpose-built kitchen and Rachel & Martin told us about their experiences developing the recipes, how they’d come up with their fatty/lean meat ratio and why they used homemade bread instead of rusk. Then we read through the recipes of the sausages we’d be making – all standard wet pork sausages but we were given two recipes for dried/smoked sausages and throughout the day, they discussed how each stage would be different if we were making them (we also got to try the dried sausages at lunchtime – super yum!). They had also thoughtfully copied out large versions of the recipes and hung them on the walls so we didn’t keep having to refer to our take-home A4 papers.
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