Tis the Season...for strawberries and meat products?

For Strawberries? Well, in our part of the world it is! There are many things I love about the month of December in America but one thing missing is fresh strawberries. Because of our mild climate, we have incredible produce almost year round. And we have two strawberry seasons-one in spring/summer and one in Dec/Jan! They just started to come out and we've been eating lots of them! We have yogurt delivered to our home everyday along with our milk so we've been making a lot of yummy smoothies. During peach season, I froze a bunch in anticipation of this season. So we've been using peaches, strawberries, bananas, and frozen blueberries (a new find for our city!) and yogurt to make all kinds of delicious smoothies! (Makes me think of you Carmen, every time I make them. You are so healthy!) Xiao Li loves them. It might be her love language.

And speaking of food being a love language-nothing speaks love to Andy like good meat products. If he could only choose one food to eat for the rest of his life, it would definitely be some sort of meat! We can get all the basics here-chicken, pork, beef. Pork is the meat of choice in this country and usually turns out great no matter how you cook it. I've had recent success with beef, as I've been using my Dutch oven and the Pressure Cooker. But i still put ground pork in place of ground beef in most recipes. So with those basics, you can do a lot. I learned to make homemade sausage a while back, which is surprisingly easy. David and Andy had both been talking about Italian sausage (you know in links) and I asked Xiao Li about making it here. In our city, the winter is sausage making time. Chinese people buy their meat and take it to the sausage making shop at the market. They pick their flavor-you can choose several, among which Spicy Italian is sadly missing!-and then the sausage maker grinds with meat, mixes it with the spices and stuffs the meat into casings and hangs out to preserve. After I did a lot of reading online, I learned that the meat and the casing being really cold is really important in the process-I guess even more so if you hang out of your window and let them preserve. So it makes sense they only make them in the winter here.

So, I found a recipe online, got the meat, made my own Italian spice mixture, and then Xiao Li took it to the sausage shop! Next thing you know we have 7 lbs of Italian Sausage ready to be consumed by all the meat loving men in my life. I actually didn't love it but Andy and David did. We froze ours as it's not the kind that preserves. Andy wants me to load up the freezer with other varieties of Italian sausage but I'm busy loading it up with strawberries!