Year of the Tiger

Welcome, possibly endangered reader, as we enter the year of the tiger. Tuesday this week marked the lunar new year, and with the large asian population in these parts, it's clear that there's some celebrating to do.

But of course another sizeable population here has more of a hispanic influence, and I've been entering into the spirit of that by making my own chorizo sausage. This is quite an involved process, involving mixing meat with salted seasoning to cure it, squeezing that mixture artfully into sausage casings, then hanging it to dry and cure properly over a period of days. The result is something which looks, smells and tastes roughly like a chorizo, which might seem like a low bar for success, but it works for me.

Making chorizo is an odd experience: in summary, you're taking raw pork, mixing it with something, then waiting a while. At the end of it you get something which is supposedly OK to eat, which is against everything your brain is telling you is right and proper in the world. But hey, I haven't got sick yet, so it must be working to some degree.

Now, sadly dear reader, I didn't entirely read the instructions on how to get the mixture into the sausage casings, and even when I did, it was a fiddly and error-prone process. As a result we ended up with chorizos that were, ahem, smaller than you might expect, and therefore rather more plentiful too:

Mini chorizos. Honestly, they taste better than they look.

To change gears slightly, in these pandemic times, we do a lot of walking, and one of the regular routes takes us through the middle of a local health clinic. You know you're in America when the health clinic needs to put up signs like this:

I like the way they have to define what a dangerous weapon is by showing us a picture. Good luck with this, Sutter Health.

We closed our week by having dinner with our neighbour here, who is from China and had cooked us some wonderful food. It was a great way to say goodbye to the ox and welcome in the tiger!