Iris and I are big fans of breakfast sausage. Some of the commercial brands aren’t so bad. I’ve been eating Brown and Serve since I was a kid. It’s not exactly good, but it tastes the same as it always has, even though you don’t have to brown it anymore (it’s microwaveable). Sometimes we buy spicy links from the farmers market, and it’s always quite tasty.

Last week, though, I made my own breakfast sausage. It was totally simple. Naturally, I used a recipe from Charcuterie. I ground a couple pounds of pork shoulder with sage, ginger, garlic, salt, and pepper. I’m still way too lazy to make links, so I cooked some patties right away and formed the rest into a log and put it in the freezer. It stays just barely sliceable, so now I can have great homemade breakfast sausage patties anytime–just slice off a few and fry them up in a skillet over medium-high. Takes about five minutes.

Next time I’ll throw in some crushed red pepper flakes. Anyway, if you’ve been thinking about making your own sausage–and I know you have–this is a great place to start. You could make chicken or turkey sausage just as easily–and the commercial turkey and chicken breakfast sausages are pretty terrible, so the gap between homemade and store-bought is going to be even bigger. If you don’t have a meat grinder, you can use the food processor, or just buy some good ground meat (or ask your supermarket butcher to grind it for you).

I wonder what I’ll come up with to complicate things in the kitchen next. I wonder if we could grow potatoes on our balcony. When it collapses, we can run downstairs and give the neighbors free potatoes.