walking while the ground pork cooks

I’d bought everything for crockpot lasagna except I forgot the mozz. :-( So that will be pushed back and we will use the Italian sausage for regular pasta tomorrow.

I wanted to precook the sausage in the crock in advance, then store it in the fridge overnight for tomorrow’s dinner. That way I couldn’t run out of time with it. I also wanted to play with the idea of using the medium dogbowl in the crock to make a smaller cooking vessel. The idea is mainly about making a more vertical bread loaf, but the sausage would be a good test case.

I put the 1# chunk of sausauge in the foil-lined dogbowl, which went into the crock on HI:

and we went for a walk

daily mini-cardio

We walked a ways up Road R, looking at rocks, the canyons, and watching the dogs get squirrelly in the cool air.

We didn’t see any more campsites but some travel trailers came by from further east so there must be some. We turned back and at some point realized we could see the van (white spot in center-right):

We got back and the dogs were tired and slept instead of eating cow vertebrae as they’d been doing previously:

the pork is cooked

After 2 hours in the crock the ground pork sausage was 170F in the center (the USDA calls for 160F although it was not browned and pretty:

I let it go another hour on LO and the top and edges started to noticeably brown. Hard to see in this pic but it’s definitely browner in person:

It gives me hope that a meatloaf might brown up if left in for a few hours. Mmmmm, meatloaf.