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!