Homemade Italian Sausage

 I love Italian sausage! I use it crumbled in lots of pasta dishes. A few weeks ago I was watching the Rachael Ray Show and she made Homemade Hot Sausage with Lentil Soup . I wasn't so interested in the lentils, but I definitely was excited about making my own sausage. The sausage turned out to be delicious and very easy to make. It's also about $1.50 per pound less than premade sausage. One of the best things about making your own sausage is that you can adjust the flavors to suit your taste. I love lots of fennel in my Italian sausage, but this caused a problem in my first batch. I didn't want whole fennel seeds in the sausage, but I couldn't find ground fennel in the grocery store. I know you can grind spices in a coffee mill, but I didn't want my coffee to taste like fennel so I tried grinding it in my food processor. Note to self, don't try that again. Fennel seeds are very hard and it took me forever to get just a little fennel dust. Thankfully Savory Spice in downtown St. Petersburg has just about any spice you could ever need including ground fennel. My next batch of sausage was even better than the first because I could pile in the ground fennel.

This recipe is great because you can use it to make many different kinds of sausage.









Ingredients
1 1/2 pounds ground pork, dark meat chicken, dark and white meat turkey or lamb

4 cloves garlic, minced

2 teaspoons crushed red pepper flakes (2/3 palmful)

2 teaspoons sweet paprika (2/3 palmful)

2 teaspoons granulated onion (2/3 palmful)

2 teaspoons ground sage (for pork or lamb) or poultry seasoning (for ground chicken or turkey), (half a palmful)

1 teaspoon fennel seed (1/3 palmful)

Salt and pepper

Directions
Combine all ingredients and chill for several hours or up to two days ahead.