The sausage "recipe."

I know Charlotte asked for this. I wanted to wait until I had tried the first sausage from out of the freezer to post about it, just to be sure my version of the recipe was OK.

I find that the amount of spice is going to depend GREATLY on the mix. My mother said she used a tablespoon of the sausage spice mix to a pound of ground chicken. I used Penzey's "Ozark Seasoning," which contains many of the same spices as are in sausage (they also have a couple of sausage mixes, I think, but this was what I had on hand). I used a half-tablespoon to a pound and that was a bit strong - not inedible, just stronger than I would have liked. Next time, I think I will go with 3/4 of a teaspoon.

All you do is put the ground chicken or turkey into a bowl, sprinkle on anywhere from 1/2 teaspoon to 1 tablespoon of your selected seasoning mix, and mix it well (like you would if you were making meatloaf). Then, you form the mix into patties, and wrap it in wax paper (my mother warned me that wax paper seemed to be the easiest thing to get to "release" the frozen patties), and put it in the freezer. I would not keep these for more than a month or two - generally ground poultry gets freezer burned easily (in my experience).

I got 12 patties from a pound of ground chicken. I made the patties about golf-ball sized but flatter (of course)

To cook the patties, heat a pan to medium heat. Put in a small amount of water (maybe a tablespoon or so) and a bit more oil (I use the light olive oil for this kind of cooking but any oil would work). Fry the patties in it - you can put them in directly from the freezer. I think it took a total of about 10-12 minutes to cook the patties this morning but the ones I had were kind of thick, and I'm also very paranoid about cooking any kind of ground meat well.

You might, depending on how lean the meat is, want to mix a bit of fat in with the meat when you're adding the spice...the patties I had were a bit dry (but that may have been because I overcooked them a little).

If you don't have a spice mix, possibly you could base the combination on this sausage recipe, from "The Little House Cookbook:"

2 pounds of lean pork, 1 pound of "fat pork" (I presume they mean pork fat, or very fatty pork)
1 Tablespoon salt
1 teaspoon pepper
1 Tablespoon crumbled dried sage

You start by cutting the meat into 1 inch cubes; then, using a chopper you mince the cubes into small pieces. (They recommend keeping the fat and lean separate, and refrigerating the cubes you are not chopping for easier cutting). Then, they ask you to combine 2 parts lean to 1 part fat, add the seasoning, and then shape the sausage into patties.

Again, here, they recommend freezing the sausage for storing - the cookbook author speaks of smoking meat elsewhere (recommending following the description given in Little House in the Big Woods to build a hollow-tree smoker), but that seems like excessive work provided you can freeze stuff). Again, you fry the patties up without thawing them (or parboiling them, as you might do with some sausages) first.

The author also gives a recipe for milk gravy to use the drippings from these, but she notes: "Although this lean sausage is well suited to modern tastes, the fat gravy may not be." (Essentially, you take a cup of milk, beat in a 2 Tablespoons of flour, and combine and cook that with the drippings and lardons that are left in the pan)