Sausage: Blood with Barley and Liver

Shortly before Christmas I was in the Antelope Valley and stopped, by a whim, at Valley Hungarian Sausage & Meat Company, located at 8809 Pearblossom Hwy in Littlerock, CA 93543 (phone: 661-944-3351). It is a very small house turned into a commercial establishment that sells mostly Hungarian sausage and appears to be quite popular. A bought a number of different kinds of sausage, but was most excited by the blood and barley sausage 

and the liver sausage, neither of which I'd had before. 

Christmas morning, I asked Mariusz Redzikowski, Sam's friend and current BYU roommate, staying with us over Christmas, to cook the sausage. He indicated that blood sausage is a traditional Polish dish cooked with onions. I asked him to cook it for us. He'd never cooked it before, so he called his mother in Poland and got instructions. We had only one large red onion, so we used it, cooking it in a little bit of olive oil. Then he sliced up the blood sausage with barley 

and added it to the cooking onion. 

The casing naturally disintegrated as he stirred it around with the onion. 

It turned into something that looked more like boiled bird seed than blood, and even more surprising, it had very little blood taste to it. 

We all enjoyed it very much. It was rich and not off-putting at all. Next he cut up the liver sausage, 

something he said was not a Polish dish, although they quite often cooked up liver and onions. So he cut up the liver sausage, discarding the casing, and added it to cooking onions as well. 

It also appeared to have barley or some other grain in with it. It looked like hash, but was incredibly tasty, very soft with a pleasant texture, not very livery at all. 

It was even better than the blood sausage. In fact, I think I might prefer the liver to most other sausage I've had, except perhaps Polish kielbasa. Neither were like any sausage I've ever had. The sausage casing acted more like a container to hold the blood or liver and then when cooked, the contents had no real semblance of sausage at all. Mariusz said that it made him feel like he was home in Poland and it added a very nice touch to our Christmas. 

Aside from the prime rib we ate later Christmas day, this was my favorite food we ate over the Christmas holiday.