Mr. & Mrs. Hawthorne Make Venison Sausage.

A friend of ours called Thanksgiving night. He'd been deer hunting earlier and had a hind quarter for us. Thank you, Brian.

We wanted to make sausage out of some of the meat and I came up with a combination of seasonings for the sausage. Mr. Hawthorne came up with the proportions after my approval. Here's our basic recipe: 2 parts salt 2 parts pepper 1/2 part smoked paprika 1/2 part ginger 1 part onion powder 1/2 part granulated garlic 1/2 part hot paprika 1/4 part coriander 1/2 part cayenne pepper 1/2 part Adobo seasoning (The Sandy-Math here is making me slightly light-headed.)

Oops. Forgot 3 parts sage.

We mortared and pestled it.

Here's a diagram of the section of meat we have: part of the loin, then the rump, round, and shank.

Compare to above drawing.

Mr. Hawthorne started cutting the first part of meat away from the hip bone.

Cutting through the other side.

Almost done.

You can see the ball joint here.

Here's the leg bone, with the other pieces of meat to the side. And I'm saving the bone for venison stock.

Here's the loin, getting ready to be wrapped up and frozen. In addition to this cut, I have 4 other cuts wrapped and awaiting the freezer. Note: This is not the tenderloin, also known as back strap. That's still in the fridge downstairs, waiting to be dealt with tomorrow.

And here's our bowl full of deer meat chunks.

An important part of sausage is the fat. We went out and found some extra fatty bacon today at Food Lion, and added 1/2 pound of bacon in with the deer meat.

Two pounds Country Style Pork Ribs went in.

First, a few drops of Stubbs Liquid Hickory Smoke over top the meat.

Then Mr. Hawthorne started grinding. The lighter meat is the bacon.

I added in some more Hickory Smoke.

And my seasoning mix.

Mr. Hawthorne mixed by hand.

Then we pattied up a bit of the sausage and cooked it to taste for possible seasoning adjustments.

It's looking quite good and smelling heavenly.

Taste test. It needs more seasoning. I sprinkled some extra seasoning on top of the cooked sausage and it was quite good. But we decided to tweak the seasoning ingredients. We added in: 2 parts red pepper flakes, 1 part black pepper 1 part salt. We added more seasoning to the meat and ran it through the grinder for a second time. Fried up more patties and taste-tested again. Our sausage is delicious. Added the rest of the seasoning. Ran it through the grinder for a third time. I would say I had about 1 1/2 cups of seasoning total. 1/2 pound of fatty bacon. 2 pounds of Country Style Pork Ribs. And maybe 8 pounds of deer meat. So there you have your proportions. And our sausage is kick-ass.

Rolled the sausages in logs, wrapped, and froze.