Christian Cooks

I was invited to share half a pig the other day, and happily accepted. Nothing better than making your own sausages!

When the big day came around, I drove up to Worcestershire with a large saucepan, some spices, a sharp knife, and freezer bags.

The two pigs we were about to process had already been slaughtered and butchered, so we wouldn’t have too much work to do. The butcher did a great job, and had even prepared a bag with cuts for sausages.

The liver weighed almost 3kg, and we decided to use 1kg for pate. I chose a German recipe for Leberwurst - this is a pate that is put into casings.

We set off by boiling 2kg of the sausage cuts for an hour. Then we boiled the liver (only for a couple of minutes until just done). Fry up 6 onions and 400g of lardons, and mince the whole lot including 6 tsp salt, pepper to taste, 6 cloves of garlic, and 9 tbps marjoram.

We hade nice boar casings and a sausage maker, so after mixing everything up, we put the mixture into the sausage maker and into the casings.

One of the crew had watched Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall’s “pig in a day” video and managed to expertly fold the sausages!

The last step was to pasteurize the pate sausages, so back into the water at 75 degrees (don’t boil, they will burst and you will have pate soup) for 1 1/4 hours - done!

The “Leberwurst” turned out lovely!

If you use sipgate (either .de or .co.uk) with your asterisk server, you are in for a surprise when you upgrade asterisk to 1.6… As soon as you have an incoming call, it gets rejected by asterisk.

The solution to this is quite simple. In your sip.conf, change the type=peer entry for your sipgate account to type=friend, and it works again.

No idea why.

I know, I know - Delia has done this before …

As easy as it sounds, not everyone can boil an egg.

Let’s start off with a word about eggs - it pays to buy a good quality, free range egg. You can taste the difference. Freshness is also important. Funnily enough, if you have chickens of your own, leave the eggs to sit for 2 days before using them for boiled eggs. If the egg is too fresh, the egg white will have a funny consistency. To test your eggs for freshness, just put them in a glass full of water. If they sink to the bottom, they are fresh. If the round end floats up a bit, it’s still fine, but not fresh. If it comes up to the surface, bin it.

Take a saucepan, fill it with water so that the water will cover your egg(s), and bring the water to a boil. Take a needle and make a small hole into the round end of the egg.

Now turn your hob down a bit so that the water stops boiling. Put your egg(s) into the water and start your timer. Anything from 4 to 6 minutes depending on the size of your egg - you have to experiment a bit with how you like your egg and get an eye for what size will require what length of boiling.

Leave the hob on low - you want to have a water temperature of around 85 degrees celsius - this will prevent the egg yolk from congealing - we want it nice and runny. If your temperature is too high, the egg white won’t be nice and firm and the yolk will be waxy.

When the cooking time is up, take your egg(s) out of the water and hold them under running cold water for about 10 seconds. This will help with the peeling of the shell and also stop the cooking process inside the egg.

Eat your boiled egg with strips of buttered toast (soldiers) - delicious!