For weeks, ever since I got the book Charcuterie, I’ve been threatening to make my own sausage. Actually, I’ve made sausage before. Once, with more than a little help from my extremely meat-knowledgeable friend Matt Treiber, I made this:

That’s two kinds of Thai sausages, *sai krok* and *sai oua*, with the traditional accompaniments. Isn’t this the sort of thing you used to do before having kids?

Sometimes I make a quick Italian sausage recipe from John Thorne’s book Pot on the Fire, where you start with ground pork and add garlic, crushed red pepper, and fennel seeds. It’s a lot cheaper than good store-bought Italian sausage, and just as good if you don’t need links.

But this time I wanted to go whole hog, or at least 3/4 hog, since I’m still way too lazy to deal with sausage casings. So I got out the meat grinder attachment for the Kitchenaid, and Iris and I headed down to Uwajimaya.

If I made a top-three list of the best things about living in Seattle, it would look something like this:

1. The weather
2. Every bar, restaurant, concert, beach party, and backyard barbecue features great craft beer
3. Uwajimaya

Uwajimaya is one of the biggest and best-stocked Asian supermarkets in the US. Iris, who is a soy sauce fiend, was delighted by the fact that they had no less than three dozen soy sauces on the shelf. There was also an enormous dragon hanging from the ceiling, its tail stretching the length of the store. We got some eel sushi and a yakitori stick for snack, then went shopping. When you shop at Uwajimaya, most likely they’ll have what you’re looking for, and if they don’t, at least you can feel smug that you’re making something so unusual that you’ve stumped Uwajimaya.

Today’s shopping list was easy. The end goal: roasted poblano sausage, a pork sausage with three kinds of chiles: ground anchos, paprika, and diced roasted poblanos. The recipe called for fresh oregano, but they were charging $3 for those plastic packages of some very old-looking oregano. “That oregano not so good,” said Iris. I decided to substitute dried Mexican oregano. We got the poblanos, a nice piece of boneless pork shoulder, some cilantro, and a lime.

Making the sausage was quite easy. I roasted up the poblanos and the anchos, skinned the former and ground the latter. I cut up the pork into chunks, tossed it with the seasonings, and sent it through the grinder. I’d been warned by _Charcuterie_ to watch out for a terrifying condition known as *smear,* where gristle gets caught in the grinder and causes the meat to mush out in a gross-looking and non-tasty way, but it never happened. Smear probably looks ten times scarier in my imagination than in real life. I also learned, because Laurie read it on the box, that the wooden stick used to push the meat into the grinder is called a stomper.

The resulting sausage tasted a lot like Mexican chorizo, but with a fresh poblano kick. I sent some of it to my parents, who ate it with scrambled eggs, and put some in the freezer. But what to do with the rest?

I’d already put enchiladas on the calendar before setting off on the impromptu sausage trip, and I figured sausage enchiladas couldn’t be bad. They weren’t, although it wasn’t the best way to showcase the sausage. Probably some of the rest will end up as a sausage patty sandwich, maybe with some slaw on it.

While I was making the enchiladas I remembered that I once had some really good enchiladas with chorizo at [Cactus Restaurant](http://www.cactusrestaurants.com/) on Madison. Looking at their menu now, it must have been the chimayo enchiladas, with chicken, house-made chorizo, blue corn tortillas, and green chile sauce. Highly recommended. Cactus also serves this great tamarind lemonade.

After dinner, Iris made up a game where she pretended to send some meat through the grinder to make burgers for the whole family. Yes, I let Iris play with the meat grinder, although it wasn’t attached to the mixer at the time and was therefore no more dangerous than the average dingo.

I didn’t take a picture of the sausage, because it just looked like a big bowl of bulk sausage and then like a pan of enchiladas. Instead, have another look at this sausage I once made!