Howling Hog BBQ (at Howling Wolf Farm)

As is the tradition with Superbowl Sunday, Farmer Girl and I cook ourselves and a few friends some football appropriate food.

This year, I made a batch of long-trail ale chili from the sirloin I ground up the night before. So named because it's got a bottle of Long Trail Harvest Ale in it, this chili is a deep, rich mix of beans and meat. Also on the menu, were our last bag of the chicken wings we butchered off our chickens. I did them up with an asian-styled soy-lime syrup.


Also on the menu was my variation on the "Bacon Explosion". This dish recently appeared as a feature in the New York Times. Many of my friends emailed me the link! Ironically, this recipe had already made its way through the various barbecue blogs I read about three weeks earlier.


The bacon explosion is: A log of sausage stuffed with cooked bacon, wrapped in a bacon lattice and smoked for a couple of hours. In my case, I was short a pound of bacon, having only enough to make the all-important lattice. So, I substituted a package of my sauced, cooked pulled pork for the center stuffing. The sausage was our own sausage, which was also pretty neat. Check out the pictures!




This year's Superbowl was one of the best games I've seen in years. Although the team I was rooting for didn't win, the Steelers (one of my favorite franchises) deserved the win they got. And, we celebrate their success with darned good food!

This Christmas Jenn bought me a commercial-grade meat grinder. The kitchen supply store had to order it for her, and it arrived on Saturday. Saturday evening I got to play with it for the first time!

We're nearly out of the beef that we bought from North Hollow Farm in Rochester last spring. We ran out of hamburger quite a while ago since it's something we cook with a lot. Left in the freezer were a bunch of small sirloin steaks, which I really don't care for a whole lot. I'm much more into the fancier cuts of steak when I eat steak. So, I cubed all of the sirloin up and made it into hamburger in the new grinder! Way cool. It was a bit lean, but still made some excellent burgers.



On Sunday morning I pulled three tiny pork shoulders of ours out of the freezer and made my very first batch of sausage. It was a recipe for garlic sausage, which has (as you might have guessed) a bunch of garlic in it. With just some salt, pepper and red wine, I was able to make a very tasty loose sausage.



I'm using some of it in one of those bacon explosions for the Superbowl.

I'm really thankful to Farmer Girl for getting me this sweet new tool for the kitchen. I am embarking on a new journey of culinary goodness! Whoohoo!