I usually don’t eat much in the mornings, but today I started the day with fresh squeezed orange juice (from a local tree), Yukon Gold hashbrowns, fried eggs (from a friend’s chickens) and homemade breakfast sausage that the boys and I made yesterday afternoon. It makes me happy that my kids are almost always interested in a cooking project and when there are “power tools” involved (in this case, the food grinder attachment on my KitchenAid mixer
) they really get into it.
The recipe we used for the sausage was basically like one I had read awhile back on the blog, Homesick Texan, except that instead of ground pork we started with 2 pounds of whole pork butt plus a half pound of fat back. I also changed up the spices a bit using fresh sage, thyme and rosemary from the garden as well as a little grated nutmeg. We ground it all up using the fine blade on my grinder, and then made a tray full of patties to freeze.
We don’t really eat this kind of heavy “country breakfast” very often (in fact, it’s pretty rare) but I try to expose the kids to a wide variety of foods as well as to the full scope of how things are prepared. It was definitely a tasty breakfast but in the interest of health we’ll probably end up keeping just a few patties and giving the rest to friends. Afterall, half the joy of cooking is in the sharing!