Fat is for summer too.

For my meat-focused friend's birthday, I got him this meat-filled book, which is connected to the Carcutepalooza Year of Meat challenge that he's been taking part in - albeit without blogging about it. Which means I get to.

His adventures have been hinted at before, but since I participated in this one, and because it was extra photogenic, and also because I've made sausage once before with another friend and thus was the resident expert, I thought it warranted its own post.

The project was also assisted by my lovely housemate's new grinder/stuffer attachment for the standing mixer. When I'm a big kid, with a real job and my own kitchen, I am getting a standing mixer and all its attachment. It's so dope. 

Also amazing: the pork shoulder butt and the fat back we got from Cannuli's. They are reliably awesome. And so was the freshly ground pork, which narrowly avoided getting completely eaten before stuffing only by a well-timed trip to the phở place down the street.

Cannuli's also sells casings, which are fun and gross. Raw pig intestine, as if you didn't know.

Stuffing the sausage is the most difficult part of the whole sausaging saga- tedious mostly, and prone to a lot of dick jokes. If I were getting a PhD in sociology, it would involve traveling the world, watching people from all cultures and walks of life stuff sausages, and cataloging their dick jokes. It would have a lot of graphs and sausage recipes.

Some of our links were pretty ugly and misshapen, but we did eventually get the hang of it. The ugly sausages were just cooked up for our post-stuffing lunch.

This is one of those perfect summer meals that make me thankful for the heat and the long hours and the asparagus.

I won't transcribe the recipe, because we took it verbatim out of the book, but we made a (not very) spicy Italian sausage. It was beautiful, once we worked out the kinks.

With all that said, it's a hell of a lot easier to buy it from the butcher.

Hot, Hot, Hot

The weather is getting really hot and sticky here, and by that I mean that it's getting inappropriate and taking off all its clothes. Time to break out the ice cream maker and the spicy peppers.

When my increasingly frequent partner-in-crime demanded that we make ice cream with his stash of extra- spicy habañeros, I grabbed David Lebovitz's excellent cookbook and did a quick google search. We couldn't find a recipe that did exactly what we wanted, but it seemed well within our comfort zone of slightly odd but totally edible and maybe even tasty cooking projects.

We were wrong. This ice cream went above and beyond tasty. The only think I would change is the quantities. More of everything.

Especially more habañeros. We candied them for about an hour, which gave them a lovely texture and flavor, with a mild - but still present - spiciness. They were perfect, but due to concerns about the spiciness, we only processed three chilis. Next time I'd do everything exactly the same, but up the number of habañeros used.

The candied chili peppers were subtle enough that we needed a low-key ice cream to accentuate their flavors. David Lebovitz's vanilla ice cream recipe did not disappoint. The smooth, rich vanilla made an excellent showcase.

This is one of those recipes that I plan on coming back to, and I'm so happy to have discovered it in the first week of this hot Philadelphia summer.

The only problem is what to do with the intensely spicy simple syrup left over after the candying process. We've bandied around a few ideas - put a few drops in drinks, use it to candy bacon, put some in the actual ice cream - but for now it's in the freezer, with a warning sign in large lettering. Suggestions welcome!

Vanilla-Habañero Ice cream

Wash well:

6-10 habañero chili peppers

De-seed peppers, and slice into small pieces. Don't touch your eyes or your face or any material objects. You are now covered in spicy.

Boil together:

1 cup sugar

2 cups water

Add chili pepper pieces and simmer for an hour. Strain out chilis, reserving syrup for another use (if we can figure one out...). Dry overnight, then place in a freezer.

Make David Lebovitz's easy, delicious:

vanilla ice cream

Once the ice cream has churned, stir in the frozen habañero pieces. Freeze until stiff, serve.

This was particularly excellent after we ate Matt's spicy chorizo as part of his monthly Charcutepalooza challenge. That recipe, although we made a few variations (mostly on amount and type of chili pepper) can be found here.

This is how Californians deal with East Coast summers.