LAMORINDA WEEKLY | Chicken & Herb Sausage for seniors - or discriminating diners of any age


Homemade Chicken & Herb Sausage Patties Photo Susie Iventosch

Local reporter Sora O'Doherty and I share a love of cooking and we email back and forth about food and recipes quite often in between issues of the Lamorinda Weekly. Sora is an avid cook and always has fun recipes, cooking tips, and interesting websites for me to check out. Recently she told me about a website called Cooking For Seniors, which, the older I get, the more appealing this sounds. She was talking about a chicken breakfast sausage recipe in particular, and since I love chicken sausage, this recipe sounded fantastic to me. I've never made homemade sausage before so it was a fun project. Plus, my whole family was staying with us at our cabin, and they were the perfect guinea pigs. We served the sausage with eggs and biscuits and everyone loved the breakfast. They turned out to be kind of like little breakfast sliders!

As usual, I made several changes from the recipe to suit our tastes, but there are links below to two different chicken sausages, in case you would like to try them, too. Instead of using dark meat, I used white ground chicken, but I do think either would be great. We also have some people in our family who are averse to sweet and savory together in the same dish, so I left out the maple syrup, brown sugar, and allspice and added poultry seasoning, which was really yummy in this sausage.

You can add or delete any of the herbs and spices as you see fit for your family, too. Also, you can make the meat mixture the day before and refrigerate in a covered container until you're ready to cook them the next morning.

Cooking for Seniors - http://cookingforseniors.org/

Easy Country Style Breakfast Chicken Sausage - https://cookingforseniors.org/recipe/easy-country-style-breakfast-chicken-sausage

Chicken Breakfast Sausage - http://leitesculinaria.com/240046/recipes-chicken-breakfast-sausage.html

Homemade Chicken & Herb Breakfast Sausage Patties

(Makes 18-20 sausage patties)

INGREDIENTS

2 lbs. ground chicken

2 1/2 teaspoons poultry seasoning

2 teaspoons dried marjoram

2 teaspoons dried thyme

1 teaspoon garlic powder

2 teaspoons Himalayan pink salt (or sea salt)

1 teaspoon ground black pepper

1 teaspoon barbecue rub spice (I used Trader Joe's BBQ 101 Seasoning Blend)

DIRECTIONS

Mix the ground chicken with all of the herbs and spices. Form into 18-20 balls. When ready to cook, heat a large skillet over medium-high heat and spray with cooking spray or drizzle a little olive oil in the pan. Using a flat, sturdy spatula, flatten the balls into patty shapes and cook over medium-high until browned. Flip to the other side and continue to cook until the second side is nicely browned. Cover the pan and reduce the heat to low. Cook until chicken is cooked through. You may need to add a splash of water to the pan before covering it, to keep the chicken nice and moist while it finishes cooking through. Serve hot with biscuits, toast, eggs, pancakes or French toast!