Sausages

written April 22, 2009

It's hard to encapsulate the food here in Kazakhstan quite perfectly, especially because new things keep coming out of the woodworks. Like the sausage I made with my counterpart on Saturday. Until I move out on my own, I've accepted that I have relatively no control over what I eat in this country (with the exception of the few apples and bananas I buy every couple of weeks because I just miss fruits and veggies so much). So, on Saturday when my counterpart asked me if I'd like to have sausage for dinner, I knew that I didn't really have a say in the matter. Honestly, I figured this meant that we would just go to the magazin and buy one of those bologna logs and fry it up in a pan with a bunch of oil and some potatoes - it's kind of a staple here. Little did I know that we were going to make the sausage from scratch!

Now, all I pictured was some factory (probably from a Mr. Rogers episode) where there are these long thin casings being pumped with ground beef and then tied off at the ends. You throw a couple of those suckers on a Weber and we're talking good old Sunday BBQ. Well, nothing is quite so simple here in Kazakhstan. First thing that tipped me off was the giant plate of "meat" she brought out from the summer kitchen. As she shoved these hunks of well, not your delicious supermarket steaks, into the meat grinder, I watched this gooey (slightly bloody?) paste squishing out the other end. I tried to maintain my perfectly pleasant expression, but my counterpart saw right through it. She laughed at my distorted face and told me that I didn't have to watch - get back to peeling those onions. It was only a few minutes later that I learned why our sausage meat had looked so, well, unappetizing - it was sheep liver, kidneys and here's the kicker... heart! Mmm...

Now, you'd think that's the worst of it, but what you're not realizing is that this is Kazakhstan. That's rarely ever the case. Symbat, my counterpart, came back again from the summer kitchen carrying a large mixing bowl. What she pulled out of that bowl made my stomach churn. The question I had failed to ask myself was what we were going to use for that long thin casing I had seen Mr. Rogers' friends filling with tasty Grade - A beef. Maybe I'm naive, or maybe I just like my store-bought chicken apple sausages, but intestine?! Really? Yup, we were going to be filling a sheep's intestine (albeit the same sheep that provided us with the filling) with his own kidney, heart and liver. I'm the kind of person that doesn't generally like eating meat off a bone (unless it's legitimate BBQ ribs) and I pick through chicken meat to find the breast meat because I don't really like the dark stuff. Basically, I'm pretty particular when it comes to the meat I eat in the states - I eat it and enjoy it, but it's got to look pretty. This was the furthest thing from pretty I could imagine. So, I let my counterpart do the stuffing and I ran into the other room to get my camera.

She stuffed the intestine, sewed off the end with some purple thread (a nice touch, I thought) and set it to boil on the stove. Although I had eaten, and actually enjoyed, kidney a couple of weeks ago, I've never been able to stomach liver. I told my counterpart this, in a desperate attempt to get out of eating this homemade sausage (not to mention heart), so she set me to peeling a handful of potatoes (in the event that I wouldn't like the sausage). I was relieved that there was a back-up, this I believe was due largely in part to the fact that my counterpart is more or less fluent in English. Had I been in one of my other host families I certainly would have had much more trouble explaining my reservations about the sausages. Although, on the flip side, I don't know the Russian or Kazakh words for liver, heart, kidney or intestine, so maybe the whole experience would have been less painful. You'll be happy to know that I'm still actively integrating into my community, so I did in fact try some of the sausage, although my counterpart was kind enough to peel off the intestine before she put it on my plate. The verdict: I still like my chicken apple sausage from Whole Foods, but I didn't find myself running to the outhouse either.

All of the products used in producing this sausage came from a sheep which was bought live at the bazaar over the weekend and slaughtered in my counterpart's backyard. Unfortunately, I was in Taraz celebrating Easter so I didn't get to witness the slaughtering, but they promised me that next winter they'll invite me over for the horse slaughtering. Yippee!! Oh, and the sheep head is currently chilling in the fridge in the summer kitchen. See if that doesn't give you some creepy dreams...