The Cookery

If I haven't mentioned it before the hubby and I have been reaching out from our cooking comfort zone for the last few years to make new and interesting things for dinner.  For example we have welcomed a dutch oven into our lives and hubby even makes bread from scratch, all things we never would have dreamed to attempt just a few short years ago. 

I first learned about the Durham Cookery about a year ago from a local foodie Durham blog.  The Cookery is a local business with two distinct aspects: a state of the art commercial food production facility and they also have a food-business incubation program.  They can help find you the perfect local cater, teach cooking classes from local restaurant chefs or you can rent the production facility by the hour which is perfect if you operate a food truck.  For Christmas I purchased hubby "Sausage Making: The Basics of Grinding, Casing and Cooking Culinary" workshop.   Have we ever made a sausage, no. Do we like sausages, yes... so this class seemed like a winner.

All hubby and I could think of was that the class was going to resemble the scene below from Seinfeld.

We had such a blast! We learned to make fresh chorizo, hot Italian sausage and a country breakfast sausage.  Here is pic of hubby learning to use the Kitchen Aid meat grinder attachment after we mixed in all the spices.

~ insert joke here ~

We then learned how to set up a Kitchen Aid attachment to feed our ground pork into the casings.  Lucky me got to set the machine up for this part of the process.  I was a little grossed out threading intestine onto the plastic pipe for stuffing but quickly remembered how delicious these little devils were going to taste and got over it. Chef Nathan then cooked up our hard work and OMG I can't not even describe how delicious everything tasted.

sausage even tastes better with your hair in it too

This class was amazing!  We would have never attempted to make homemade sausage but now have first hand seem how easy it really can be with the right kitchen tools.  I have a feeling that a few items for our Kitchen Aid mixer might end up in the Amazon cart today.  Any local Durham readers out in blog land, I definitely recommend to check out some upcoming classes at The Cookey as it made a great gift for hubby.