What’s the holiday without a housemade pate in the fridge?

It’s the season for hunting and slaughtering and my catering kitchen has become a butchering room.

In the walk-in refrigerator hang four sides of pork and two sides of venison.

Our neighbor, Bobby brought over the meat of a fresh killed buck as we will need the lean meat to add to our pork and pork fat to make sausage.

Fernando, who grew up in Uruguay and whose father’s was a butcher, works with my husband Rich on the kill and the butchering.

The typical kitchen equipment is replaced with meat grinder and stuffer, as well as Freezer paper, markers, tape, and casings (which are necessities) and spices, wine, garlic, parsley, cream, eggs, kirsch, beer, bourbon, whiskey and bread. The last four items are a part of lunch during the day.

We weren’t as prepared as we thought we were and ran out of casings. Calls around the island did not produce any hog casings, and we had to put the sausage making on hold until the next day.

Next year I’ll attempt to clean out our pigs intestines and use them.  Now that is something to look forward to!

We seem to try different sausage recipes every year. This year Fernando read us a family recipe for Butifarra. A search for Butifarra on the internet described another recipe using raw pork for a white sausage in the Catalan tradition.

Fernando’s recipe was straight from an Argentinean book which was well worn and had a 1943 publishers date. This was his grandfather’s book and Fernando laughs at me when I ask him to translate the title of the book for me into English: “It’s not possible, this was already translated once-from Italian to Spanish, it does not go to English!”

This recipe is more like stuffed head cheese:

• We make a stock of carrots, celery, spices and water.
• The heads of the pigs are simmered for a few hours.
• The meat is thoroughly separated, then sent through the fine holes of the grinder.
• The meat is then sent through the stuffer and guided into casings.
• The casings are then dipped intro simmering water and plunked into cold water to pull out any remaining fat.

I take to making pate. I normally use a shoulder and the liver and that was my intentions, but somehow when I wasn’t looking, the shoulder got mixed in with the pork fat/venison mixture.

I love a course country pate that is full of texture with kirsch and loads of parsley. This is more French than Italian, but is my personal preference. One liver produced 12 terrines. I must make a note to try to collect more terrine molds as next year I would like to use all the liver. We sautéed the other one with onions and had it for lunch with gremolata which is simply chopped parsley, garlic and lemon zest.

I am ready for the holidays with the gathering of friends and I have ready a basket with a plum pudding, a pate, and a bottle of port.

Now this is holiday cheer!