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Playground? I grew up playing with Army men on a dirt hill with firecrackers. Then advanced to Mattel Machineguns in the woods playing "war". Then it was Wiffle Ball and football in the neighbor's yard. Of course, in the winter, it was snow ball fights with built fort igloos and sledding down the unplowed main street.

Howdy y’all, and Happy New Year! Many of the food threads I have started here over the years are based on my family recipes or traditions. I’d like to take a little time and share another one with you. One of my favorites! It has long been a tradition in my family to make sausage on New Years Day. For over 50 years, we have hunted deer and hogs between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and NYD was always our sausage making day. It was always fun, and a great way for the family to get together and enjoy each other’s company. Since my dad passed away in Feb 2020, it’s now up to me to carry on the family tradition. While I didn’t hunt this year to make deer sausage..I decided to adapt and overcome, and make something equally as tasty. I made 2 varieties of sausage., we’ll get to that in a bit. Earlier this year, I bought a cookbook called ‘Food Lab’. In it, is a section on grinding your own meat, and making sausage. After reading it, I discovered after all these years, we had been doing it wrong! Oh, the horror! Our long held family tradition was in error! To set the correct course, I incorporated the lessons I learned in Food Lab. I have to say, it’s been a great education, and we turned out a better product. Unfortunately, I didn’t take a LOT of pictures, but I’ll give you the general idea. I don’t know why they didn’t post in order...but you guys are smart enough to figure things out. Lol As I said, we made 2 varieties of sausage. Sweet Italian pork sausage, and chicken, Parmesan, and parsley sausage. I’ll briefly walk you through the procedure, and the recipe, in case you want to try this yourself at home. I highly recommend it...you’ll make a better sausage than you can buy from your butcher, AND have the added bonus of knowing exactly what goes in your food. First, the sweet Italian sausage. I bought a pork ‘picnic’ from the grocery. I chose this because it has a good ratio of meat to fat. This is extraordinarily important. You’ll want a 80% meat to 20% fat ratio for ANY sausage you make. This will ensure your finished sausage stays moist and tender. Nobody likes to have a dry piece of meat in their mouth! A good kitchen scale is vital to getting the proper ratios of meat/fat. The other important fundamental of making sausage is the ratio of meat to salt. You should have 1.5-2% salt to the total weight of your meat/fat. A scale also comes in handy here. Additionally, the salt and spices you choose to add must have adequate time to ‘work’. This is where my family sausage making went wrong..we didn’t allow enough time for the salt to do its job of breaking down the myoglobins in the meat. We would grind meat, season, and stuff it in casings all in the same day. This is not the best way to make sausage, as I have learned. The basic Italian sausage recipe is as follows. Note that the meat/salt measurements are metric. It’s much easier to calculate the ratios that way. For what it’s worth, I doubled the recipe below. 1 Kg pork with at least 20% fat content. Cut into 1” cubes. 15g kosher salt. 2 medium cloves of garlic. Finely minced. 1tsp dried oregano. 2 tablespoons fennel seeds 1/4 tsp freshly ground nutmeg. 1tsp fresh ground black pepper. 1 tablespoon red wine vinegar. 2 tablespoons red pepper flakes (if you want to make hot Italian sausage). At least 12 hours before, and up to 24 hours before grinding the meat, cut it into 1” chunks, and season it with the salt, spices, as red wine vinegar. Mix it well, and let it sit in the refrigerator until it’s time to grind it. It’s extremely important that the meat is very cold. Not quite frozen, but close. This will prevent the fat from melting in the grinder, and becoming an emulsified mess. You don’t want your beautiful sausage the consistency of a cheap hot dog. I have found that it helps quite a bit to put the metal bits of your meat grinder in the freezer for a few hours. The blade, grinding guide, auger...the whole kit and kaboodle. This will help keeping the fat nice and firm. I use an electric meat grinder, and (now) a separate sausage stuffer tool. A manual grinder works too. Grind the meat using a medium grind. If the fat starts to get sloppy looking, STOP! Put it back in the freezer for awhile until it firms up again. Again...you want an even grind of meat/fat. Not a sloppy, gloppy mess. You can stuff the ground meat into sausage casings, or make them into patties. Your personal preference. I like to use natural hog casings. They are usually available in the frozen section of your grocery store. Be sure to rinse the salt they come packed in. Some people use synthetic casings, but I think the texture is horrible. The chicken sausage used the same ratio of meat/fat/salt. I used chicken thighs, but you can use breasts if you prefer. 1Kg chicken of your choice. I used boneless/skinless thighs. I used raw bacon to add the proper amount of fat (20%) to the meat, but some people use the skins. Or, you can use chunks of pork fat. Personally, I wanted a little bit of smoky bacon goodness in my sausage. 15g kosher salt 3 cloves of finely minced garlic 1/4 cup of finely grated Parmesan cheese 1/8 cup finely chopped fresh Italian parsley 1 Tablespoon fresh ground black pepper. 3 tablespoons dry white wine. Procedure is the same as for the pork sausage. Stuff into casings, make patties, or whatever turns you on. I know some people who like to cold smoke their sausages...I’ve done this once or twice, with great results. For this batch, I’m keeping it simple, and going with non smoked. It was a fun day of making sausage!! We even had the infamous Zeke(sadly, banned from this forum), and his lovely girlfriend come over to help.....well, help isn’t quite the word. They ate, drank, and chatted with Mrs Tex and I while I did the work!!! They took home a few pounds of fresh sausage. Seems to me, they got the better end of the deal!!! I hope you’ve enjoyed my little tutorial. I encourage you to try this!! It makes for a fun day, and great eats!!

<<<looks around for Mrs Tex.... She has a spectacular derrière!!

All sold

Do the neighborhood kids that don't play outside talk amongst themselves in hushed tones to not to let the baseball get onto Old Man PK90's yard, or else he'll come out to the porch and yell about 'getting off his lawn, you damned kids!' before rambling on about walking to school uphill both ways in the snow in bare feet?

My wife works in the mortgage business and it's not slowing on her end. Lots of refinancing due to the low rate, and a large amount of people are looking to become first time home owners. Lots of realtors call and ask about listing my home. The conversation ends quickly after I state the listing must include a "Leftists need not apply" clause.

Maybe he just made his billion in Bitcoin, and is looking to retire in the Caribbean, anonymously? I hear Jeffrey Epstein's island is for sale.

not following surely you realize you cannot 'delete' anything you've put on the internet and let sit, with regards to forums like this. are you planning on blowing something up and need to clear the slate? lol just kidding

If you recall, the last record high was December 2017, when it hit 19K, and all the fools rushed in, only to see it collapse through 2018, all the way down to 3K in 2019. Are you feeling luckier THIS time?

Anyone considering selling in the next few years, should consider selling soon, when the prices are up. When all this financial shenanigans of the pandemic money finally causes it's damage, and foreclosures/evictions ramp up, you'll wish you sold at the high. Go rent something for a year or two and let the dust settle. Housing prices in my neighborhood were moving basically side ways the last 6 years. This past year, they increase 10% - 20%. The last few houses that sold, sold for OVER list price.... It's nuts... and these people put very little down, so if prices reverse when rates go up this year, they'll be immediately underwater.

The problem with your plan for most people is that they have to sell their current house to purchase one elsewhere. If the market sucks then unloading will be a problem. Especially in NJ where there really isn’t a need to justify the taxes/cost when most people are discovering they can work from home.

it's not universal and it's driven by pockets without mtg, debt is now 25% of income which has happened 3 other times and each time, major correction. Now the intangibles and externalities that matter here are the fed, cheap liquidity, and other forms of payment. That said, this will become an issue and housing will suffer when it happens. We're keeping our powder dry to buy something down south when it hits and it's going to

And that's what will probably happen for the people who bought this last year. Mortgage rates at record low levels, and as we all know (well, maybe not all), people buy "payments", not "houses". Low rates push up prices, but that will end soon. If you want to buy, I'd wait a little longer. Once the eviction moratorium and foreclosure moratorium end at the end of this month, landlords and owners will be dumping houses that they haven't been paying for since March. Landlords will NEVER collect past due rents, and will probably just dump the losing investment. Hell, I saw a week or two ago, there over $400 million in utility bills unpaid last year. Not only are people not paying their mortgages, they're not even paying their utilities, due to the moratorium on shut-offs. That's all going to change soon....

Its like the ammo market right now. If ya need it then ya gonna pay for it. Unfortunately. I totally understand the renting aspect. Shit, I lived at home and saved my money until I was 30 cause renting made absolutely no sense to me. Unlike most my friends who made a dash for apartments after college. I would careful researching any homes current market value vs historical, just to get a sense of what the home may be worth in a year or two when all this crazy stops, or worse. When we bought our house the sellers took a 30% hit from when they bought it at the high market in 2006.

Me. I’m selling my house this year.

$350 to $500 and even higher if a really nice one. I have two M44s. One is a shooter and the other is a Polish made M44 mint that has never been fired and ain't gonna be....She's just too pretty!

This is pretty much all neighborhoods, never see kids out, maybe walking a dog. I think most kids even know what a stickball bat is, remember as a kid my mom always yell at me for taking the broomstick. Hell we used to play with bottle caps, anyone remember Skullys or as we called it skeelzes? Did I spell that right. As far as having the lastest and greatest, Kids today are spoiled, part if the problem is parents, their to busy for their kids, it's part of the society we live in now.

She certainly has some talent. And some amazing balance. Yeah, but today's kids have thumbs of steel. I'd bet half of Gen Z probably doesn't even know how to ride a two wheeler without training wheels.

Too much work. Jimmy Dean takes care of it for me.

Sounds like it would be more effective to ban urban shite-holes.

Give me a call next time. I’ll come over and drink and take home the product of your work. I won’t even bring a crockpot.

To keep vampires away?

Besides sammiches, what else have y'all used pork roll in? I've used it in fried rice, beef borguignon (bacon substitute), spaghetti carbonara, and in mac & cheese.

RIP. After all these year, most people know who she was. Dementia is a horrible way to go.

Maryann was way hotter than ginger

Last I looked, political beliefs was not a "protected class." You can freely discriminate against lefties.

Meh, I dont see the same metrics in the housing market that were around pre 2008. You had people foreclosing on homes they could never afford before they bought the house. If the economy slumps foreclosures will rise, that's a given, but its not going to drive the recession like it did in 2008. In 2016 we went through a very lengthy financial process to open a mortgage, something that didn't really exist before 2008. If the housing market enters a state of "crisis", basically everything else will be too. However, it will be due to increasing unemployment and not junk bonds or people who would default on their loan by taking a 100 dollar a week pay cut. With the current economic state, foreclosures are going to happen no doubt.. and the longer this artificial shutdown goes the worse its going to be.

Correct! Note - it does not say “Ham” anywhere on there. It says Taylor PORK ROLL

Does that fit the definition of unstable? That's the ONLY way to consider it. Here's the visual:

and, who is that helping?