Sausages

We ate lots of sausages in England last summer and unanimously decided that English sausages are the best (that's how I remember it anyway). When we got home I decided that it would be fun to try and make some sausages, but it took until this year to get around to doing anything about it. I ordered a sausage stuffer like the one above from Germany (over engineered and rather expensive) and it was delivered last week. We have half a pigs worth of minced pork in the freezer (16 x 750g bags) and they sell pigs guts for making sausages in the supermarket so we were set.
I did 3 different types

• Fresh sage from the garden
• Fresh oregano and fennel seeds
• Paprika and smoked paprika

They are all really nice and I made enough for 4 meals from 3 bags (2.25kg) of mince. However the lessons to learn are - 

1. make sure there is plenty of fat mixed in with the meat. I chopped my speck by hand and it wasn't really integrated in the meat enough. 
2. Don't skimp on the seasoning, it seems to disappear in the cooking.
3. It's a bit messy and fiddly so it should really be a bulk process.

We think the first effort has been a success and except for the price of the stuffer, we can make our own sausages with organic meat and no dodgy chemicals for less then the cost of the factory ones we would normally buy from the supermarket.