My sister is getting married! I am the maid of honor and not the official photographer. That title goes to Jonathan Roberts at Bluephoto. But I get the opportunity to photograph the events that lead up to the wedding and improve my photography skills.
Sis is very crafty and many of the decorations, gifts, "guest book", etc. will be DIY projects - I am so excited to help! Her fiancé is also very crafty - in fact he just started his own side project, Crafty Drafts, and the wedding will feature his hard cider, beer, ginger beer, and barrel-aged cocktails.
My father's family is Italian and they have always made sausage and salami. In the spirit of hand crafted traditions, the families of the bride and groom came together to make salami to be served as an appetizer at the wedding!
The day started early. Sis, fiancé and I, guided by our dad, removed all of the fat from 36 pounds of beef, then cut the pieces into chunks. We moved on to 30 pounds of pork - the fat from the pork remains, but we removed little bone spurs, veins, and other yucky stuff, then cut the pork into chunks. We netted 59 pounds of meat. Note: this recipe is reduced from the days when it called for "four pigs and two cows." The meat was ran through a grinder and placed into a wooden trough, the Italian name of which no one can really seem to remember.
Next came the spices - chopping garlic and grinding pepper. Note: most of the people in this party are engineers, so when the pepper grinder purchased at the store was taking too long to do its job, they fashioned the hand coffee grinder to a power drill. The spice mix, some broth and wine were added proportionally to the ground meat and mixed by hand. We finished up by pressing the ground meat into casings and tying to be hung.
The salami will cure in our cousin's cellar for about 6-8 weeks. It will lose about half of its weight and I'm absolutely sure it will be delicious!
