Make it yourself: Sausage

Melissa here!

I thought I'd share with you tips on stretching your food budget! With me being an unemployed student, we have a pretty tight grocery budget in our house. I rarely buy things like sausage or cookies or muffins at the store - instead, I purchase the ingredients and make them myself. Sometimes this is more time-consuming and can be a pain, but not always.

I recently got a hankering to make myself a breakfast bake, but didn't have any sausage in my freezer. I had plenty of other ground meats, though, so I felt it wasteful to go to the store and buy something that I could easily make at home. I opened up my trusty friend, Google, and found a recipe for making sausage out of ground beef or ground turkey.

I don't keep much ground beef or pork in the house, mostly because we love making hamburgers on the grill so it disappears within a couple of days after coming home from the store. I do, however, have a large stock of ground turkey and ground venison. Ground venison is one of those things that are best seasoned and cooked to death, really, so I decided that it would make a great addition to my breakfast bake!

Now, I did modify the recipe to meet my own needs based on what I had on-hand. It calls for:

• 1 pound of ground turkey or very lean ground beef
• 1/2 teaspoon of salt
• 1/2 teaspoon of garlic salt
• 1/4 teaspoon of pepper
• 1 teaspoon of cumin
• 1/2 teaspoon of sage
• 1/4 teaspoon of basil
• 1/4 teaspoon of oregano

What I actually used:

• 1 pound of ground venison
• 1/2 teaspoon of salt
• 1/2 teaspoon of garlic salt
• 1/4 teaspoon of pepper
• 1 teaspoon of ground cumin
• 1 teaspoon of Pampered Chef Italian Seasoning Mix

The reason I substituted the sage, basil, and oregano with the seasoning mix is mostly because I didn't have the sage on-hand and I figured that the mix (which also has basil and oregano in it) would be a welcome substitute, though if you don't have sage on-hand, you could also substitute rosemary or marjoram in its place.

All of the ingredients were mixed together in a bowl (and I didn't take photos because... ahem... raw meat looks gross no matter how good your lighting and camera), and then I threw it in a pan and browned and chopped it for my bake.

I kind of used the same idea as the bake recipe on the same page that the sausage recipe gave, but I don't buy canned biscuits or crescent rolls and didn't feel like spending the time to mix that dough up. I dug through my freezer to find either hash brown potato shreds or something similar, and settled on some tater tots, mostly because I was out of hash brown potatoes and had no raw potatoes on-hand either! 

So my recipe went something like this:

• Tater tots (enough to put a single layer on the bottom of your 9x13 baking dish... it took 71 Schwan's Tater Rounds - which is apparently a discontinued product they no longer offer in their catalog)
• Browned ground sausage from recipe above
• 4 raw whole eggs
• 3/4 cup milk
• 8 ounces mozzarella cheese, shredded 

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Place the tater tots along the bottom of the pan, enough to create a single layer. Create a second layer with the browned sausage. Mix the eggs and milk together in a bowl and then pour over the top of the sausage-potato layers. Layer the shredded mozzarella cheese over the top. Place in oven and bake for 15 minutes. Let sit 5 minutes before serving.

It turned out to be pretty delicious! I was a bit skeptical about using the mozzarella cheese because I typically use shredded cheddar on breakfast bakes because of the stronger flavor, but the mozzarella still added something to the dish while still being mild enough to let the sausage be the star. 

So, there you have it. When you're in a breakfast (or dinner, in our case) pinch, and don't have any sausage on-hand, you can make your own in just a few minutes. Not only does it save money, it also cuts the sodium down completely, avoids nitrates and other chemical preservatives, and gives you more control over how strong the seasonings in your sausage are!

Until next time!