Thanks ya'll! Yeah, I'm REALLY glad I didn't try smoking it yesterday! It's now 4pm and I'm still only at 157* internal! mballi, taking it to 150, eh? I'm sticking to my 165ish for now, but you've done 152 with success? elaborate, if you can, i'd love to cut some time off this. No biggie either way, I kinda needed a day at home to enjoy doing not much. My 2 year old keeps me plenty busy as it is and I was able to re-stock my personal hot-sauce stash. 32 oz of something that resembles cholula chipotle hot sauce. with guajillo, pequin, chipotle, homemade chipotle, and arbol peppers!
For the record, this summer sausage is ~60% deer that a good buddy of mine killed recently and 40% pork shoulder (nothing fancy). I supplemented the LEM Backwoods seasoning mix with black pepper and my home-made chipotle powder based on others comments that the LEM is missing some kick (and I'm used to KICK!).
I did the casings just b/c I wanted to try "the kit" first before I tried my hand at it myself. In the past I've had some trouble using cure without any idea of what the end product should/would be like. But the casings were a bit of a pain with the deer...and the cure made everything tacky and hard to extrude with my underpowered kitchenaid. The casings one look cool but I'm not sure if they were worth the extra effort. I could more easily mix up some SS (with or without smoke) with bison/pork or whatever from the grocery and roll'em up without casings with much less effort...