Homemade Sausage--failures and successes

So, our adventure in making sausage for the first time....
Let's step back a few months. Weldon bought me a KitchenAid for my birthday back in March. And between him and his mom, they got me a few attachments for it, some of those attachments being a food grinder and sausage stuffer. But, I haven't been able to use all the attachments to their full capacity simply because when I got them I had a 2 1/2 month old. Now that she's almost 7 months, I have a little more time on my hands.
So, back to the present. We finally got around to buying the meat we needed and got all set up to make sausage for dinner.
The meat we bought--some chuck steaks and pork roast

Our first sausage was going to be beef with feta cheese and whatever else we decided to throw in. Weldon started grinding up the meat while I got the other stuff ready and took pictures.

After some of the meat was ground, he noticed a weird dark spot in the meat. Best as we can figure it was grease from around one of the screws in the grinder. We weren't sure how much of it had gotten in the meat, so we threw all of that out. There's the failure. Sounds simple, but it was about $5 worth of meat and probably 30 minutes of prep and work gone.
And that was going to be our sausage for dinner.
So, we turned to our second piece of meat, a pork butt roast.

We ground this up, mixed in feta cheese, fresh basil, salt, garlic powder and onion powder. Then it was time to stuff the casings. We are by no means professionals, but it worked. The casings did pop open while they cooked, but I don't know if it was the way we did it, or if it would have happened anyway.
The finished sausages (therefore, the success!):
Our little helper:
I tried to get a picture of Cora in her Johnny Jump-Up, being so sweet, but she was bouncing too fast, so the pictures didn't turn out. She ended up falling asleep in it while we cooked.
Now to the recipe we fixed. I thought I had posted this one before, but I couldn't find it. I used these tomatoes from our garden--well, just the yellow cherry tomatoes.
And, oh my, was this good! We've had this meal with store-bought sausages and tomatoes, but this was by far the best yet!! I didn't take a picture of the finished meal, because we were too hungry, and there wasn't much left when we were done.

Sweet Cherry Tomato and Sausage Bake

• 2 pkg. of ripe cherry tomatoes - mixed colours if you can find them
• 2 sprigs each of fresh thyme, rosemary and bay
• 1 tablespoon of dried oregano
• 3 cloves of garlic, peeled and chopped
• 12 good-quality coarse Italian pork sausages
• Extra virgin olive oil
• Balsamic vinegar
• Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Preheat the oven to 375°F. Get yourself an appropriately sized roasting tray, large enough to take the tomatoes in one snug-fitting layer. Put in all your tomatoes, the herb sprigs, oregano, garlic and sausages. Drizzle well with extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar and season with salt and pepper. Toss together, then make sure the sausages are on top and pop the tray into the oven for half an hour. After this time, give it a shake and turn the sausages over. Put back into the oven for 15 to 30 minutes, depending on how golden and sticky you like your sausages.

A couple of notes...I almost always use dried herbs, and it's fine.
This time, I used probably one package or less of tomatoes, and only 4 sausages. I don't want y'all thinking we ate 12 sausages!!!
It only took about 30 minutes total to cook this; I don't know if that's because the sausages were fresh, or maybe because there was 4, not 12.

There's our experience with making sausage, frustrating at first, but the end result paid off. I will do it again, definitely!!!