Wild Pork Skinless Sausages

Wild Pork Skinless Sausages

Over the weekend our whanau celebrated the marriage of one of my cousins. This event bought family and friends together from across New Zealand to Wellington to acknowledge the relationship between the gorgeous bride and her fetching groom, along with having a great party, a good feed, dancing and generally having a good time. The day brought great weather to the picturesque venue above Oriental Bay. The brief window of still, warm weather meant we could be outside on a fine, tranquil Wellington afternoon and well into the evening.

After the wedding, drinks and nibbles were served. One of the items on offer was a cheese. Naturally I asked about the cheese and was told that it was made by a couple who were guests at the wedding. I got talking to them and they had made the French style cheese, coulommiers, at their home in Dunedin and bought it up especially to share with the happy couple. They source the milk from a nearby goat farm that has saanen goats. On a warm day the cheese was soft and gooey, it tasted great with a slightly nutty flavour on the palate. It had a white bloomy edible rind. I am very keen on eating cheese, and while this is a sausage blog, I do believe that good food should be acknowledged. The couple who made the cheese also said they had brought some halloumi, also made from goats’ milk, to cook on the barbecue later in the evening.

 

 

Around 10pm the barbecue was fired up. Of course I was interested to see what was being cooked. I talked to one of chefs, another friend of the groom. He said he only ate wild meat, and he had supplied wild pork patties. For the purposes of the sausage blog these will be euphemistically referred to as "wild pork skinless sausages." Also on the barbecue were some crayfish and the halloumi.

The skinless pork sausages were a plain minced pork, the flavour of wild pig from Taranaki bush country was to be savoured. The guy who provided these said to me that he also makes what he calls a firecracker sausage. He uses manuka to smoke chillies and he then combines this with a bit of paprika to make a spicy hot sausage. I would have been interested to try these, however he did not bring any with him to wedding. Another time perhaps…

However the best food on the barbecue had to be the halloumi. It tasted great on a piece of bread as we gazed across a still Wellington harbour. The caramelisation on the outside of the halloumi made it crunchy. It was ooey, gooey, and melted in the mouth in the middle. With a saltiness on the palate, it was cheese that slid down quickly after a long day of festivities. It was also worthwhile to have talked with the cheese maker earlier in the evening. She was cooking up the halloumi and said to me as soon as she saw me, "I’ll make sure you get some good pieces."

 

 

So with great food, fantastic company among whanau, old friends, and new that I had only just met, we were able to converse and gaze over a beautiful, serene, flat Wellington harbour which provided fabulous reflections of the city lights on the water. We wished the newly married couple all the best that life has to offer as we relished and consumed the food being cooked on the barbecue.

It had been a long and enjoyable day as we headed home after midnight with our kids - a day that I am sure we will all remember with great fondness for a long time to come.