Local Pork Sausage

This month I hosted my book club, and had chosen The 100 Mile Diet as the reading choice for the group. In the spirit of the book, I planned a snack menu to feature food that covered varying degrees of "local." Some was as close as you can get to 100% local in terms of production, some was produced locally but with ingredients that were not all local. It lead to great discussion, and tasty eats. One of my snacking plates featured meatballs and cheese. The meat balls were made by taking the Lincolnshire sausage from Irving Farm Fresh meats, cutting the casing and making the meat into little meat balls for easy snacking. I frequent the Irving Farms booth at the farmer's market almost every time I go, so I suppose it is about time they got a shout out from me.

Irving Farms allows their pigs to roam and forage outdoors, which essentially means that you are getting free range pork (why is that not as common as free range chicken?). The result is a darker more heavily marbled pork, and with that comes extra flavour. The whole sausage is natural, including the casings. I picked mine up at the City Center Farmer's market, but they are available at all the big markets around the city (including St. Albert).

I have not tried all of their flavours because my husband loves the intense sage flavour of the Lincolnshire, and freaks out if I deviate from that now. If you don't love sage, I have also had the pork and leek sausages, which were significantly milder. In the next couple of weeks I will be trying out their pork belly roast, after seeing that they featured pork belly as part of the Indulgence event put on by Slow Food Edmonton . It made a nice meat and cheese plate with the Sylvan Star Gouda I picked up downtown as well. Sylvan Star is a great local cheese producer that has consistently had cheeses placing first in various categories at the Canadian Gran Prix of Cheese - did you even know such a thing existed?!?!

The whole grain mustard I served it all with was not local in any way.