Drobi Day

As much as we'd like to just sit around and daydream about life in our new house, we've been occupying our time with other things lately. A few weekends ago, we spent a Saturday at Don's parents' house making drobi (pronounced drubby).

The closest thing I've been able to find online is this recipe, which is a little different (and spelled differently) than what we made. Either way, it's a Slovak recipe that has been a tradition in Don's family for a long time.

We spent the first part of the morning peeling potatoes. I don't remember how many pounds we peeled exactly, but it was at least 50.

That's the very first potato of the day. I'm not sure why I thought that needed to be documented.

This is just one bowl of many. It was a lot of potatoes. And then we added some onions.

At that point, we moved out to the garage where there two grinders ready and waiting.

Then, little by little, Don and his brother put the potatoes, onions, bacon and ground beef through the grinders.

This next photo exists to prove that I was there, and that I helped.

Also, that's my purse hanging up in the background. It came home with a coating of drobi. Lesson learned.

Once everything was put through the grinders, we ended up with several containers of this:

A secret mixture of herbs and spices was added to each bowl, and then they brought out the casings.

The casings were too much for me to handle, and I went to the kitchen where I stood at my post at the stove for the rest of the day.

The potato/onion/bacon/beef mixture was put back through the grinder again, and fed into the casing.

That's Don demonstrating the well-stuffed casing.



Each one was tied off, and then brought in to be boiled.

Each pot was to boil for 15 minutes. It was my job to watch the pots and make sure nothing went wrong. I didn't do very well. Almost every time, at the 8 or 9-minute mark the sausages exploded. We adjusted the temperature. We left more room for expansion. And they still exploded. So, I fished out the sausage innards with a slotted spoon, and took it back out to the garage to be put through the grinders again and into a new casing.

I'd really like to end this post with a great shot of the perfectly-formed sausages, or of Don's family enjoying the final product. Unfortunately, I have neither (though they did enjoy the final product the next day at our Easter meal). Some of them did turn out great, and the others were deemed acceptable as single-serving sizes. And now there are multiple freezers stocked with delicious drobi, ready for future family gatherings!

I'm aware that this post is a mess, complete with multiple paragraph alignment styles and pictures rotated where they shouldn't be rotated. Sorry about that. My HTML skills are a little rusty, and Blogger is hardly cooperative.