Spring is here!

Here in New Zealand, the seasons always start on the 1st of a month.  So Spring started on September 1st, then Summer will start on December 1st.  You can do the math for the following seasons.  This is the last weekend of October and the sun finally made an appearance.  Hallelujah!!!!

Since the sun was shining, we decided to start our traditional, Saturday- Seafood BBQ, which will go on till we can’t anymore (maybe late March).  Each Saturday, we choose 3 (or 4 if we are greedy) different types of seafood to season and grill in 3 different ways.  This Saturday we had lemon fish, which I seasoned with garlic butter, lemon ride and lemon juice.  We also had prawn skewers and steamed mussels.  For veggies, we had asparagus and courgettes all dressed with garlic butter.  YummY.

Since the sun honored us with its presence   for both days of the weekend, we headed to the beach.  Anawhata Beach is a west coast beach that has black sand.  To get there, you must hike down through the Forest for about 20 minutes until you get to the beach. 

Sunny and Alex loved it!  They ran….

And ran………

And ran…………

Then we settled near the water and sent Alex to her cave!

We took a self-portrait... Look at the happy couple:)

We had a fantastic time at the beach.   I think Alex and Sunny will sleep like little angels tonight.
Night, night kids.

All in a day’s work

While my husband is the handy sausage maker, I’m still the chicken keeper. I currently have 7 chickens ranging in age from 3 years old to 1 year old.  Out of the seven, five are laying.  One is retired from laying and the other is confused is she is a he or a she.

Being mid-Spring, this is the high season for laying.  This is all in a day’s work. 

We had these exact fresh eggs with yesterday’s homemade sausages.  We are very spoilt in this house.

Boys and their sausages (trying to keep this PG12)

My husband has always wanted his sausage to be longer and tastier than any others.  Well, this weekend was his moment to man-up.  Show me what your beef is made of Baby! He finally brought out the sausage maker I bought him 2 birthdays ago.

Because most store-bought sausages have such a high fat content (and us being such health nuts), he’s always wanted to try and make leaner sausages.  Per 1 ½ pounds of meat, most recipes add ½ a pound to 1 pound of pork fat.  Yuck! 

He was a man with a mission this weekend.  I was only the photographer as he didn’t want me to touch his sausage…. I’ve never!

So, to start, he marinated the meat and herbs.  Once the meat was ready, in it went into the meat grinder.

This shot is from the other side.

Next he had to put all the ground-up meat back in the grinder to push it into the casing.

                                           (I have no comment about this photo but know I’d love to!)
It’s a tricky thing to fill the casing evenly through a very long sausage without breaking it.  See my honey’s long sausage.

Next he had to make them into individual sausages by twisting them at every 5 inch intervals.

Here’s the finished product and a very happy honey.