Homemade Italian sausage for recipes

Here's something I recently tried and really liked.  I've mentioned before that my hubby and I could pretty much eat soup all fall and winter long.  I have a huge collection of soup recipes and we could cheerfully eat soup for supper every night.  It's nice too that when we have our young friends over for Bible study and a meal, they also love soup and are always thrilled to see a pot of soup on the stove.

Some of our favorite soups call for bulk Italian sausage -- usually fairly easy to find, but in recent years I prefer chicken sausage or turkey sausage to pork or beef.  Poultry sausages can often be found in links -- delicious though expensive -- but it can be a challenge to find them in the bulk variety.

For awhile now I've been wanting to look for a seasoning recipe to make my own Italian bulk sausage using ground chicken or turkey.  If I had had any idea it was so easy, I would have done it years ago!

I adapted this recipe from one that I found at Tastes of Lizzy T.  Here's what I used to turn 1 pound of ground turkey into 1 pound of bulk Italian sausage:

ITALIAN SAUSAGE SEASONING MIX
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon fennel seed
1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1 teaspoon dried parsley flakes
1 teaspoon Italian seasoning
3/4 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon instant minced onion
1/2 teaspoon instant minced garlic OR garlic powder to taste
1/4 teaspoon paprika

Place the salt, fennel seed and red pepper flakes in a custard cup.  Use a wooden spoon or similar implement to partially crush the fennel seed and the red pepper flakes into the salt.  They don't have to be completely crushed, just partially so, and you will get a nice aroma of fennel as you do.  Now add all of the remaining seasonings to the custard cup and stir to mix very well. 

Sprinkle all of the mixture over 1 pound of ground turkey or chicken in a bowl of appropriate size.  Mix the seasonings into the meat very well, using your hands.  Then crumble and brown the sausage as directed in your recipe.  (You will want to wash your hands very well following the mixing and crumbling steps.)

 Here are links to a couple of the soup recipes I mentioned.  Both are from Taste of Home,  and both have been recent hits with supper guests.

Pasta Sausage Soup is the soup pictured at the top of the post.

Hearty Butternut Squash Soup is pictured below.

 Of course, you could also multiply the seasoning ingredients to make a large batch of sausage seasoning to store in a jar for future use.  (If I figured right, you would then need 5 1/2 teaspoons of mix for every pound of sausage.)  A jar of this mix would also make a nice kitchen gift or a nifty addition to a gift basket for someone who enjoys cooking.

Hope this idea is helpful to someone in this busy season!