Fat: What is it they say about making sausages?

Nice, eh? 

You have to grind the meat a couple of hours before you stuff sausages, so I decided to do that right before I went to pick up Owen from school to drive him to piano lesson. I thought it would take me just a few minutes to run the meat and fat through the grinder and I'd be on my way. (I'm making the lamb sausages from Jennifer McLagan's Fat.)

I eventually called the piano teacher and told her we'd be late. I called fifteen minutes later and told her we couldn't come. You can't leave the house for an hour with a grinder full of half-ground meat. It took close to forty-five minutes, start to finish, as stringy and sinewy bits of lamb and sludgy fat kept getting stuck in the machine and I had to repeatedly disassemble and clean the whole apparatus. My fault. I didn't read the manual before I started, which is a really awful habit. Then my mother called in the middle of this: Aren't you supposed to be at piano lesson? Lecturing ensued, and I almost threw the phone across the room. That is another really awful habit.

She is here now. I just heard a car pull up. She has brought one of her oldest friends, an amazing cook, and I think that despite the rocky beginning, sausages will be fun. I just got a look at the casings and they are slippery and very strange and I like that! We're also having scalloped potatoes, a salad with butter dressing, and homemade donuts for dessert. I've never made good scalloped potatoes, but if anyone can point me in the right direction, it is Anne Mendelson.