stats don't lie... pesto sausage, whole wheat slackdough and tempura smelts

I guess one could call me an international blog-star... that's right, folks in Russia are peeping on my meat blog.  strange, but neat.  Serbia and others as well, small world.  Anyway, busy times.. wife's on full steam selling her goodies on ETSY and doing crafts fairs right now and life goes on alongside.  Like I said, busy.  But not too busy to innovate
   Take sausage for example... I haven't posted in a while but wanted to mention the newbies.  Last week a small batch of Extra Hot Italian which was basically our house Hot Italian with added cayenne, a nice amount and it did fairly well too, bonus.  We'll keep making it, thank you.  Also a Lamb Spinach and Feta sausage.  a few obvious flavors tossed together for a friendly reunion.  Rather Greek I guess, really seems like a Mediterranean pizza or sautee for atop pasta to me.  I'm sure there are applications aplenty.  Then Thursday last week we produced a Basil Pinenut Pesto Sausage which required quite a bit more pesto than I had expected.  It was jazzed a tad with some extra salt, pepper and garlic but otherwise drew it's flavor straight from the pesto jar.  Lovely, untainted, fresh, delicious. 
   Otherwise, having pleasant success with bread I couldn't resist sharing.  The photo is of the loaf I've been chasing for quite some time now.  It's a 35% whole wheat loaf based on a slack dough with a touch of sourdough starter for flavor and baked at a crisping 450 F.  That high temp gives the dough a great bounce in the oven and creates a nice dark crust with a very moist interior.  It's really the big pockets of air which are the greatest achievement for me.  The challenge is not getting them, but getting lots of them uniformly distributed throughout the loaf.  This batch worked out especially well. 
 
                                                                                    Last cool tidbit for tonight, tempura smelts.
These fishies are really popular up here and I'm told most people eat them with all the bones intact, but gut them and cut off the head, dredge them in flour and fry them in butter.  They're most often eaten by the guy who caught them and if you come up here mid-winter you'd see folks fishing in shacks on lakes or over the river when it's all iced up.. it's called "smeltin' " and is apparently a valid excuse to take a few days off work to drink beer.  These were store bought.  I de-boned mine and tempura fried them.  The sauce was of apricot preserves, soy sauce, cayenne and a dash of fruit juice.  I was also yummy.  Got this idea from a sushi restaurant downtown in Portland where I ordered them years ago when I had extra money for going out. Theirs were a tad nicer.