Have you ever got ready to make supper and realized you don’t have the sausage you thought you had? I have and it can ruin a supper plan, especially if you’re on a short timeline.
Sausage herbs & sausage
But thankfully it’s really easy to make homemade sausage. It’s a simple recipe and it tastes fabulous.
I’ve used this recipe with deer, beef and pork and they were all good. The flavor is just like store bought sausage. I know you’re going to love it.
A Breakfast Style Sausage
This is a sage-type recipe, not a sweet maple style. It makes a great breakfast sausage out of any of the meats mentioned above. It can be used in any recipe you want to use it in.
Mixing herb miix with ground pork.
The ingredients are simple and ordinary, mostly things you probably have in your spice cabinet.
Ground pork from our local meat locker.
This recipe is for 2 pounds of meat. It’s easy to divide or add, however you need.
Sausage Recipe
2 tsp of sage
2 tsp of salt
1 tsp of ground black pepper
1/4 tsp of dried marjorum
1 TBL brown sugar
1/8 tsp crushed red pepper
1 pinch ground clove
Mix your spices together in a small bowl.
Cooking sausage seasoned pork
Add it to your 2 pounds of your choice of thawed meat.
Using your Homemade Sausage
From here you can crumble and cook so you can add to any dinner or breakfast dish like a frittata, or other breakfast casserole.
Cooked ground sausage.
Or you can make it into patties for a side of eggs or even as a part of a supper mix.
This recipe taste just like a sage breakfast sausage you can get at the grocery store.
Cooked sausage, pasta, a white sauce and your choice of a green.
It’s great used in several kinds of meals. This homemade sausage can be used in everything from pizza to breakfast. Using white sauce or red sauce.
Ground sausage and red sauce made from home grown tomatoes.
It’s simple and it’s really easy. Enjoy!! Give it a try. Let us know what you think, how you used it and if you feel inclined share your awesome recipe. I’m sure we’d all appreciate it.
Thanks for following along. Let me know what you’d like me to try and share. I’d really love to know what you would like to see.
I pulled out Italian sausage links for a last minute supper today. I pulled them out this morning with no idea how I was going to use them.
At some point around noon I did a Google search “recipe Italian sausage onion pasta”.
I knew I didn’t want a tomato base recipe, so I looked for anything without tomatoes. I found a recipe called Creamy Italian Sausage Pasta.
It wasn’t exactly what I was looking for because I didn’t have all the ingredients the recipe called for. But I decided I could adjust. When you’re looking at “last minute” you look at how you can improvise for this last minute supper.
Substitutions
This recipe called for penne pasta. I already had a different type of pasta open, so I use it instead.
Cooked, strained pasta
The recipe called for a ground Italian sausage but I was using link. I just cut it up in small slices and used it instead.
The recipe called for adding cream. I did add cream, but my husband likes a gravy so I added about 2 1/2 Tbls of flour first. I didn’t drain the grease, added the four and then added the approximately 2 cups of cream to make a roux, then a gravy.
Local raw cream
I buy whole raw milk from a neighbor weekly and usually make butter out of the cream. I’ve been putting the butter in the freezer, so I decided I could use the cream for this instead this week.
Once I made the roux, I shredded a little more than a cup of shredded parmesan cheese. I stirred it in until it was melted.
Then I added steamed broccoli and cauliflower instead of the called for spinach. I really love spinach. But I didn’t have any, so I improvised.
Improv for a last minute supper
The best part of this last minute supper is to improvise the ingredients you don’t have or don’t want with what you do have or what you like better.
Broccoli in pasta
Don’t be afraid to try a new recipe, with your own twists. You’ll be surprised how good it can be.
Tell me how you improvise on recipes and share with the rest of us.
I use tortillas in place of bread most of the time. I use them for everything from peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to mini pizzas.
My husband is still a bread kind of guy and that’s okay. But that’s sorta what pushed me to try making my own homemade tortillas.
I’ve got to confess that I’ve tried making these several times in the past and never could get it figured out. So I’d go back to buying them.
But the packages are so big, it’d take a month of Sundays to eat them all.
So I decided to try again. I looked over several recipes, tried a few and finally put together a simple recipe that works for me.
These homemade tortillas are not only easy to make, but you can change them up a little. It’s real easy to add any herbs or spices to make them taste exactly how you want them to.
I call these “Tortilla seeds”
You could add rosemary, basil, garlic powder, or onion powder (Onion powder is really good). Or you might want to add dried spinach, kale or nettle for just a little extra nutritional value. Experiment a little and add whatever might strike your fancy.
This recipe makes 8 at a time which will get me through about a week or two.
There’s only 4 ingredients so these homemade tortillas are really easy to make.
And they stay soft, which is I found amazing after trying to make them before. It’s not the same soft as the store bought, but they’ll roll for a burrito.
Homemade Tortilla Recipe
Tortilla Ingredients
2 Cups of flour
1 tsp salt
3 TBL shortening
3/4 cup of hot water (about 100 deg F.)
1 tsp of your preferred herb or spice (optional)
Mixing Instructions
Mix flour and salt until well blended. If you’re going to add any herbs or spices, now is the time to do it and combine it well.
Next add the shortening and cut it into the flour mixture until it is completely mixed together. I use a pastry cutter but you could use a fork or a couple of butter knives to cut in the shortening.
Then add the hot water and mix completely. Use your hand and just keep mixing to incorporate all the flour until you have a soft dough. If the dough is sticky, sprinkle it with flour and knead it until it becomes soft. It should come off your fingers easily when it’s ready.
Now separate into 8 even balls. I’ll cut the whole thing into 2 pieces and keep dividing each piece into 2 more pieces until I have 8. Then roll them between your palms to make balls.
Press your dough balls out flat, one at a time. You can use a rolling pin to roll them out, a pie pan to squish them or a tortilla press. For more on that, see below.
Heat a skillet to med/low heat. Once the skillet is heated add your flat tortilla shell and let it cook for 30 seconds. Then flip and cook the other side for 30 seconds. Then flip one more time and cook for another 30 seconds. During this last 30 seconds your shell should blow up like a balloon.
Once I remove it from the frying pan, I lay them out on a cooling rack to cool. If you’re going to use them right away, you may want to wrap them in a tea towel to keep them warm.
Pressing your homemade tortillas.
My cast iron tortilla press. Be sure to use something between the dough and the press, or you’ll have a mess.
I bought a cast iron tortilla press with a Christmas gift certificate about 10 years ago and until this year I had never used it. It always sounded liked a great idea, but I just never got around to it.
Now I love it and it’s a regular in my kitchen.
I found out that you need to use something to press your dough between or it sticks. Yep, I did that.
I found out that a gallon sized baggie with the zipper and the sides cut off works great. The raw tortilla comes off the plastic easily and all in one piece.
Or you can use a rolling pin. Flour your rolling surface and your rolling pin and you should be good to go.
Or you can use a pie pan and just squish it flat. I haven’t tried that yet, but I’ve read about people using this method. I’d probably use the baggie on this one too. Save a mess.
They don’t have to be perfectly round to still taste good.
Frying your homemade tortilla shells.
The term “fry” is a little misleading. I use a cast iron skillet to fry up my shells but I don’t use any oil. My guess would be you wouldn’t need oil in a non-stick skillet either, but I’ve never used one of those.
You’ll want to let the skillet get to temperature before you start otherwise that 30 second count won’t work right. Then try to lay the tortilla as flat on the pan as you can. Somehow I always have a wrinkle in it, but that’s okay.
The first 30 seconds.
Then let it cook for 30 seconds. After this first 30 seconds it won’t look like it’s cooked enough, but that’s okay, turn it anyway.
The second 30 seconds.
Cook it for another 30 seconds. Now it’ll start looking like what you’d expect a homemade tortilla to look like.
The last 30 seconds.
Then turn it and cook it for the last 30 seconds. During this last 30 seconds it should start to puff up. It’ll look like a blown up balloon. It’s my opinion that that’s what helps make them more soft.
After I cook them I lay them out on a cooling rack to allow them to cool so they won’t condensate in the fridge. I store them in a baggie in the fridge with a paper towel, to soak up any moisture that might be in there. This keeps them from getting soggy.
Homemade tortillas cooling before I put them in the fridge for the week.
But if you wanted to use them right away, you’d probably want to wrap them in a tea towel to help keep them warm.
So there you have it, homemade tortillas anyone can make.
Do you have a homemade tortilla recipe you love and would like to share? I’d really love to hear it.
And if you give this recipe a try, let me know how it turns out. I’d love to know what extras you may have added and how you liked it.
At first glance you wouldn’t think these two things have anything to do with each other. How can aroma therapy have any relation to pickling spices?
Pickling spices
Yeah, I was kinda surprised too. I’d never pickled anything before the refrigerator pickles I learned about this summer. If you haven’t seen that, you can find that recipe here.
But this pickling is different than the refrigerator pickling.
I found a recipe for picking in a book I’ve had for years, but hadn’t really ever used yet.
The reason for the need
The okra in our garden this year has exploded. By the end of the week, I’ve got 2-3 gallons of okra that I have to process. And while we’ve discovered we love fried okra, you just can have that every night.
We’ve never grown okra before, so we had no idea how much we would get.
I finally counted my plants last week and we have 21 okra plants. I think that’s about 19 plants too many, unless you plan to sell them at the farmers market. That might just happen next year.
So I’ve been drying a ton of it. I’ve frozen a few gallons of it, but I need to save freezer space for after hunting season. So I’m sticking to dehydrating.
But I wanted to try something different.
A friend of mine suggested pickling it. I’d seen some recipes, but really wasn’t sure about it. She kept telling me how good it was. She told me how her mom used to make it when she was a kid. And she also remembered how long they had to wait for it to be ready to eat.
Just sitting around in open jars would be great too.
So I got my books out (I love cook books and have a ton of them) and started looking. I found one pretty quickly.
The recipe called for pickling spices with a recipe for making your own pickling spices mix in the book too. I knew I didn’t have any pickling spices in the house, so I checked the recipe. I had almost everything called for and hoped the few things I was missing wouldn’t be a big problem.
The recipe talked about making adjustments for your own tastes, so I figured it’d be fine.
I put the recipe together in a mason jar and shook it to mix it all up. Then I opened the jar. Holy smokes!!!! Does that ever smell awesome.
I’ve used the spices twice now to make pickled okra and will probably try it with something else in the future, just not sure what yet. But I think what I’ll actually use it for next is to boil in water on the stove top for the incredible aroma of it.
The aroma therapy of pickling spices
it’s really pretty to look at too.
This stuff smells like Thanksgiving Dinner and pumpkin pie all wrapped in one. It’s warming and homey and the smell alone will make you feel cozy. Like you’re wrapped in a warm blanket on a cold day.
I’m pretty sure you can pay money for stuff from the store that smells like this. But I say, why not make your own.
It’s really simple. You probably have most, if not all, these spices in your kitchen cupboard already. It’s easily adjustable, if you want to make any changes, although I think it’s great just as it is.
Pickling Spices Recipe Mix
This recipe is from the book Food in Jars, Preserving in Small Batches Year Round, by Marisa McClelan. This book has some really great recipes.
3 TBL black peppercorns
3 TBL crushed bay leaves
3 TBL whole allspice
3 TBL corriander seeds (I didn’t use this)
3 TBL mustard seeds
3 TBL juniper berries
1 TBL whole cloves
1 TBL dill seeds
1 cinnamon sicks, broken into pieces.
Shake your jar to mix.
Put all ingredients in a jar and shake to mix.
I’ll be trying this to scent the house when it cools off a little. Probably should wait until we aren’t running the air conditioner on a regular basis.
I hope you check this out. I was greatly impressed and I think you will too.
Let me know what recipe you have a recipe like this. Sometimes a little aroma therapy is all it takes for a relaxing evening at home after work.
Every time I go grocery shopping, I look at snack crackers that I can munch on that will side track me from something sweet. Everytime I refuse to buy them telling myself I can make my own homemade snack crackers.
Cooked crackers
I looked for all kinds of recipes and found several that looked good, but just kept putting it off, because, well, you know, it was just so much easier to just buy them.
One night while watching YouTube I came across a channel called Living Traditions Homestead and they were making homemade snack crackers. He kept talking about how easy and quick it was.
After watching it several times I found that it really is pretty easy, just like he said it was. It’s also pretty easy to change it up if you want.
Homemade snack crackers cooling off.
I’ll give you the recipe he gave and then I’ll talk about how you can change it up.
Homemade Snack Crackers
Ingredients:
1 Cup oat flour
2 Cups all purpose flour
2 tsp salt
2 tsp sugar
4 TBL oil
1 Cup warm to hot water.
Instructions:
Dry ingredients
Combine flours, salt, and sugar. Mix together well. Add oil and mix. I used my stand mixer for this, using the whisk attachment.
After the above was mixed well, I changed the attachment to the bread attachment.
You may or may not need an entire cup of water. So add about 1/2 to 3/4 of the water to the flour mixture and blend until well mixed.
I only used about 3/4 of a cup of water for this batch.
Rolled out dough on wax paper. Helps keep the mess down.
From here add any additional water you may need a tablespoon at a time. You want a dough similar to bread or biscuit dough.
It’s easier to add water than it is to remove it. So go slow in how much you add at a time.
Roll out your dough on a floured surface as thin as you can get it.
Use a pizza cutter to score the dough into the size of crackers you want.
Bake at 425 deg. F for 7 minutes. Then remove them from the oven and spray or brush oil on top of the dough and sprinkle with salt or sesame seeds or whatever else you like. Then put them back in the oven for another 7 minutes.
After you’ve removed them from the oven, let them cool. If you scored them they will break at those scored lines.
Here’s some lessons I learned.
Scored dough, ready to make.
I didn’t get the center thin enough, so the center wasn’t as crunchy as I would have liked. Around the outside of the dough it was nice and crunchy though.
When I make my next batch I’ll roll it out in much smaller batches so I can get the inside much thinner.
I’ll also score the dough all the way through next time. It seemed to cook better that way.
The other thing they mentioned in the video, that I actually tried, was to add dried herbs or spices to the dough along with the dry ingredients.
You can add herbs and spices to mix it up a little.
Powdered ingredients with spices and herb.s
I used 1 tsp garlic powder and 2 tsp oregano.
There’s so many things you could add. You could add basil, dehydrated tomatoes, thyme, rosemary, onion powder, etc, etc. Be creative.
After all was said and done they really were good.
Previously, I tried this recipe using whole wheat flour and they were really hard. Either whole wheat is too dense for crispy crackers or they were too thick. Honestly, I think it was a little bit of both.
Since this mixes different flours, I think I’ll change that mixture up next time, trying something different. Maybe using some coconut or almond flour. That might add some good flavor too.
You can make your own oat flour if you don’t have any.
Powdered ingredients.
Oat flour is not something I have hanging out in my cabinets, so I had to make it. The Living Traditions Homestead video showed how to make it.
I used quick oats but you could use whatever kind of oats you have in the cabinet. Then just blend it using a blender, a bullet, a ninja or one of those personal smoothy makers.
I put a cup of quick oats in a regular mouthed mason jar. The mixer blade fits perfectly on the regular mouthed jars.
So I attached the mixer blades and just used it on the blender for make an oat powder or flour.
Let me know if you give this a try.
Tell me how you liked them. Even the uncrispy (is that a real word?) ones taste good, they just don’t have the crunch.
Let me know what herbs or spices you used. I’d love to hear what you come up with.
