Eight Acres

Before we had our last steer butchered I went to great trouble to source an organic sausage mix for the butcher to use.  Ideally I would just make a sausage mix, but there are a few problems with this when you do a homekill beef steer. Yum :) Firstly the butcher doesn't have all morning to fiddle around with bespoke sausage recipes.  He likes to just tip in a premix, add the water and churn  out the sausages.  Secondly, when you have 50 kg of sausages to make, you get ONE chance to get your special sausage recipe to work, otherwise, you ruin all those sausages.  So while I'm all for experimenting with my own sausage recipes, butcher day is not the time to do so!  The alternative to buying a sausage premix was to buy a sausage maker and make our own after the butcher had packed up.  Have you seen a butcher making sausages though?  That is a SKILL that you need to work at.  We have attempted to make sausages before with our auger j...

My husband and I have been making beer for a few years now and once we get into a routine its pretty easy to keep up a plentiful supply of nice tasting beer. We don't drink heaps, but its nice to have some there when you feel like it and I HATE throwing out cans and bottles all the time. "[I recommend]… bread, meat, vegetables and beer." -Sophocles' philosophy of a moderate diet For a good explanation of the general beer making process see this website , I'm just going to explain what we do, but there are lots of different options to suit different timetables and budgets.  We use a keg system, so that we don't have to clean lots of bottles.  We have two fermenters and usually put down two brews at a time.  We use the big cans of concentrated malt extract and 1 kg bags of dextrose (one day if we have the time and energy, we'd like to try starting from the raw grains, but in the meantime, the cans work really well).  We currently have an ale bubb...