Turkey Breakfast Sausages

One thing I miss is pork - not that you could tell from my last three blog posts, right? It's not cut out of my diet due to the whole paleo thing, it's just that I don't make it much because Ben can't eat it. I can't even cook it when he's home, or he'll react to it.

My absolutely favourite pork items (besides bacon) are breakfast sausages, and cheddar smokies...neither of which I am willing to eat anymore. Bacon is even a hard sell for me these days, unless it's nitrate free. Breakfast sausages and smokies are full of disgusting fillers, nitrates, wheat, and a whole lot of other stuff I don't even want to think about. But I digress.

I miss sausage. So I found a couple recipes to make breakfast sausage out of ground turkey, and bought a package of organic ground turkey (not as good as pastured but until they start selling that in the grocery store, I'm stuck). I've always been very dubious of ground turkey, chicken, and pork. My brother makes turkey burgers all the time but the last time I used it I didn't like it, and haven't, since. So this was a total experiment.

I used the recipe from cavemanfood, with a few changes because I didn't have exactly the same spices. But they turned out really well, aside from being kind of dry and needing salt - which was totally my fault because I missed that line in the recipe. I'm not sure if you can buy anything other than "extra lean ground turkey" but if you can, choose one that's not so lean. Or maybe baking these would keep them moist. I don't know. ***edited to add: I made up a double batch and added 1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil to the meat mixture before forming into patties. Made a HUGE difference in texture and moistness.

Ingredients
1 lb ground turkey
1 tsp onion powder
1/4 tsp of each: ground ginger, red hot pepper flakes, cumin, black pepper, nutmeg, oregano
1/4 to 1/2 tsp sea salt
1 1/2 tsp of poultry seasoning (or 1/4 tsp ea of basil, sage, and thyme-mine has other stuff in it too but it worked fine)
1 lightly beaten egg

Mix all items together. The original recipe suggests you refrigerate it for an hour to let the flavours meld. I didn't and they turned out great. You'll have to use some kind of oil in the pan so they don't stick. I used a 50-50 mixture of cultured butter and organic olive oil.

Now, if I can find me some pastured pigs and order some ground pork, I'll be making up thousands of these puppies and throwing them in my freezer for when Ben's not home.

In case you're interested, each 120g serving has around 130 cals, 1g carbs, 1.6g fat, and 27g protein. Wowza! Add more fat grams and calories for the type of oil in which you decide to cook them. For some perspective, I used a .65kg package and got 8 flat little patties out of it. Two of those patties is 120g. This is a fantastic high-protein, low-fat and low-carb meal option!