I’ve received a few comments from various folks about a segment I did on the radio yesterday, and I wanted to expand on it.
If you haven’t listened to yesterday’s episode (which can be found here), the second segment was non-political. Last week, I mentioned off-handedly that I had some venison to cook and I really wanted to make some venison sausage. Talked about a couple of recipe ideas on the air and moved on. One listener contacted the station and offered to give me some tips. Another reached out on social media.
While I ended up making red beans and rice on Saturday, I followed through and made the sausage on Sunday.
I have a couple of cookbooks that offer tips on sausage making. My go-to is Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn. It’s a wonderful cookbook that really walks you through the step-by-step process of salting and curing meats, smoking them, making terrines, and making sausages. The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science by Kenji Lopez-Alt also walks you through the process of grinding meat and how to spice them while offering a great scientific perspective. I also highly recommend Chasing the Gator: Isaac Toups and the New Cajun Cooking by Isaac Toups, which also provides the basics and has a stellar boudin recipe.
I like cookbooks that don’t just tell you the recipes but also give you the processes, history, and/or stories behind them. I enjoy reading, and cooking is one of my favorite hobbies. I like learning about it and then applying that knowledge. I know it seems like a really nerdy take on cooking, but then again it’s me so it’s pretty on-brand.
So, I used a sausage recipe from Charcuterie and modified it a bit based on the spices I had at the time. The recipe called for a few warm spices, so I used garam masala. I added garlic, trinity (celery, onion, and bell pepper), white pepper, salt, and curing salt. I used a 50/50 mixture of pork and venison, mixed it with the spices, and stuffed it into hog casings. They smoked for a few hours and came out delicious. I will be using some of the sausage links in a chicken and sausage gumbo this weekend.
The venison I used in the sausage came from a deer my nine-year-old shot and killed while hunting with my father-in-law. She wants to go duck hunting next. Luckily, my father-in-law wants to take her duck hunting. I just want some duck to cook. Charcuterie has a section on confit, and what’s more classical than confit duck?
But I don’t just cook because I love food. It is therapy. A chance to unwind.
I essentially work several jobs. I teach during the day. I have a radio show in the afternoons. I write at RedState (and occasionally elsewhere). I’m a husband and parent. I am a supporter of my school’s sports teams and go to a lot of their games. I essentially am a counselor to a lot of students. It can be a lot.
The jobs that require me to focus on news and politics, though, are part-time but the amount of focus you have to give those topics can make it feel like a full-time job. The divide in our country (or even within our own friend groups) takes its toll. Add everything education has become over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, and you have a lot of weight on your shoulders.
On the weekends, I largely unplug. I have to, for my sake as well as my family’s. I spend time with them. I like to cook big on the weekends, and lately, my two daughters have wanted to be more and more involved in the kitchen with me. It’s a great time (they are more interested in baking, though, which is not my strong suit - I hate precise measurements).
If I didn’t cook, I would find something else. I might re-teach myself music or do some non-political writing. I may have picked up art again. I might have gone back to reading more fiction. Who knows? But cooking is where I ended up, and I love doing it.
Because of the news and politics side of my work, I spend a lot of time on social media. I have to because it’s a tool for growing my platforms (RedState, the radio show, and here). It’s the nature of the game, despite how toxic those places can be. It’s all so divisive and vile. The most active Twitter users are the most obsessed with politics, and it’s all-or-nothing for a lot of them. They have very little tolerance for disagreement or opposing views. When you’re buried in that world for up to hours a day, you lose a bit of yourself to the volatility of it all and you become like those people.
You have to learn to step back. Take a break. No sane human being can be in that state of mind all the time. Even in Washington D.C., the politicians and lobbyists will spend the next three nights celebrating Mardi Gras rather than having meetings. We all need to do the same (not necessarily Mardi Gras, but that’s not a bad idea). We need to remind ourselves that we have lives outside of work, outside of politics, and outside of the media. We have a duty to ourselves and our families to not get sucked into that world 24/7.
But there are far too many people who obsess over this stuff and drag others into that world. And I’m sorry, but I can’t occupy that space with y’all. So I’m going to unplug every Friday and I recommend a lot of other people try it, too.