Thanksgiving -
I love Thanksgiving. Who doesn’t love a holiday that features food right up front. But even I realize that this holiday has more going on than food. I would like to take a moment to give thanks to all the baby goats that had a short but happy life on our farm and now give us our beautiful sausages.
I am/was a city girl with a pretty limited understanding of the relationship between cheese and meat, so I’d like to explain to those of you who don’t understand the connection how it works and why some of our animals become food. In order to get milk from an animal that animal has to give birth. Goats give birth every year and we milk them for about 10 months. Most goats have two babies, and about half of those babies are boys. Boys don’t make milk and we can’t breed all the goats that are born every year so some girls don’t continue their careers after year one.
Different farms have different philosophies for how they deal with the offspring of dairy animals. Some farms slaughter the boys at birth, some sell them at the sale barn once they are weaning age and others use them for meat. We try to sell all the animals we can to happy homes, but with 450 babies each year, that model quickly becomes impractical. We choose to raise the babies on our farm and give them a nice, albeit short, life. They have access to pasture and plenty of room to run, climb, jump and be goats. In the late summer or early fall we take them to our local USDA facility to be slaughtered and made into sausage we sell in our local markets.
We are proud of our sausages and hope you’ll help to support local meats.
Following is a recipe for Goat Sausage Stuffing/Dressing with Green Apples.
I grew up eating dressing with my Thanksgiving turkey, but if you want to use this as stuffing, go right ahead. I ‘m a weird blend of North/South, so Jimmy Dean would have been the typical sausage we used for dressing, but our Avalanche Farm & Dairy Pork and Goat Sausages are awesome in this dressing.
Ingredients
5 cups of bread (preferably stale) cut into small cubes
1 pound Avalanche Farm & Dairy Pork and Goat Sausages
1 medium onion, chopped
2 ribs celery, chopped
1 Tbsp sage, chopped
2 tsp. rosemary, chopped
2 tsp. thyme, chopped
1 tsp. salt
1 – 2 Green Apples, chopped
½ bunch flat leaf parsley, chopped
1 cooked turkey liver, chopped (optional)
¾ cup chicken stock
4 Tbsp. butter, melted
Directions
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Spread the bread on one or two baking sheets and bake for about 5 minutes or until toasted. Transfer the bread to a large bowl.
Add a glug of olive oil to a large sauté pan, and sauté the onions and celery and 1 tsp of salt over medium high heat until soft, about 5 minutes. Remove the sausage from the casing and break it up into the sauté pan. Continue cooking until the sausage is browned. Add the sage, rosemary and thyme and continue to cook 1 minute longer.
Pour sausage mixture over the bread and mix in apples, parsley and liver if using. Toss in the stock and melted butter. Add more salt and pepper to taste. If using for stuffing stuff loosely into the cavity of your bird. If using as dressing place in a casserole dish and bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes, or until golden brown and crispy on top.
