A Fat-full Breakfast

The best meals so often come from leftovers!

We had a cookout with some friends on Friday night, and there was about a pound of leftover burger meat sitting in the fridge looking at me this morning.  In the summer, due to my husband's job, I don't cook lunches or dinners, so the leftover meat had to be eaten for breakfast (we have the option of eating breakfast at hubby's work as well, but it is usually mass-produced pancakes, muffins, waffles, and the like...not a good way to start the day).

What to do with ground meat for breakfast?...sounds like sausage!  I somewhat adapted the turkey breakfast sausage recipe from Nourishing Traditions and made gravy from the drippings...oh so good!  This was my first time to make real sausage gravy for breakfast, and the kids loved it.  The gravy - just drippings, a little flour, and milk - seems sweet when paired with the salty sausage.

Now, I'm pretty sure this meal would not pass the politically-correct-breakfast test, and it will probably never appear in a commercial describing a "balanced breakfast."  It is too heavy on the meat and butter, and light on the high fructose corn syrup.  But (except for the white flour in the gravy...someday I'll be rich and use arrowroot powder as a thickener), I can feel good feeding it to my family (someday I'll also be able to use all pastured beef and turkey in the sausage too...but we do what we can).

Here is the sausage recipe, as adapted from Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions:

Ingredients:

1 lb. ground meat (mine was a combo of beef - to convince the hubs that it was burger meat - and turkey - because grocery store beef scares me, and turkey seems marginally better)
1 onion, finely minced (I nearly pureed mine in the food processor this time, and it was perfect!)
1/4 tsp each cumin, pepper, nutmeg, oregano, cayenne pepper, and ginger
1/2 tsp each dried basil, thyme
1 tsp sea salt (the recipe originally calls for 2 tsp, but it always seems salty to me)
2 Tbsp. whole grain bread crumbs
2 Tbsp. butter
1 egg (whoops, I had no eggs this morning... so I used the handy exchange of 1 Tbsp. ground flax seed plus 3 Tbsp. water)

Instructions:
Combine all ingredients, form into patties, and saute in butter.

After cooking off my sausage, I added about 2 Tbsp. of flour to the pan, mixed it for a minute, then gradually added about a cup of milk to make sausage gravy.

Posted at Monday Mania at The Healthy Home Economist and Hearth and Soul at A Moderate Life (et. all), and Titus 2sdays at Time Warp Wife and WFMW at We Are THAT Family, and Pennywise Platter at The Nourishing Gourmet