small and smokey

this weekend was spent listening to a lot of the talking heads and hunting down sausage making stuff. the boyfriend is making a chicken, bacon and spinach sausage for his class project next week, and he didn't have a grinder so we got to spend part of sunday goofing around town looking for one. i didn't realize this, but you can find a fairly large selection of meat grinders at sportsmen's type places. evidently, a lot of deer and elk and other game is turned into sausage-y goodness, which totally makes sense. while hunting down natural hog casing (which was way harder than finding the grinder) we stumbled upon silvana meats; a butcher shop in the little town of silvana. yesterday we ventured on down there to check it out, and the moment i saw the small shop i was smitten. we walked in, and the smokey smell of hams and bacon and other cured meat delights was the first thing to greet us, and i knew it was true love. for a small shop, out in the middle of seemingly nowhere on a monday afternoon, they were hopping. there were never less than three people waiting in line the whole time we were there, and it was only 3:30 p.m. while waiting to buy our casing i found these gorgeous smoked cornish game hens. initially i was only going to buy one to check it out, but the smell! i'm telling you, it's positively narcotic how happy the scent of smoked meat makes me. i was fairly certain that they would be good, so i bought two, just in case. we cracked one open when we got home, and the kids and i devoured it cold in about five minutes. the joy of a small drumstick wasn't lost on anyone, trust me. the skin was too smokey and lovely to waste, so we put it in a hot pan and made cracklings with it (since everyone knows cold skin is gross!) which were also promptly gobbled up.

if you eat meat, and are anywhere in the vincinity of silvana, i highly recommend a trip to this meat emporium. the meats they offer are all natural, butchered on site, and the staff is friendly and crazy-knowledgeable about meat. they also offer about five hundred different varieties of sauces, salsas and marinades, which we're anxious to try out. you can buy a single, solitary steak, or half a cow. a tiny ham the size of a baby's head, or a whole pig for barbecuing. i won't even start talking about the selection of bacon, because we don't have enough time. it was a great field trip, and afterward we had a celebratory beer at the silvana road house, where someone won big on pull tabs and we got a free round! later this week one of my tiny hens is bound to become smokey little sandwiches, if it lasts long enough. if it doesn't, it's still going to be delicious.