Homemade Sausage and Hashbrowns

We made a fantastic breakfast Sunday morning of homemade sausage and hashbrowns (recipes from Allrecipes.com are at the bottom of the post).We were at the Farmer's Market Saturday morning and bought 2 lb of potatoes and some sausage from one of the vendors.

The ingredients for the hashbrowns included potatoes, diced onion, egg, salt, pepper, and olive oil for cooking.

In addition to the sausage (which was fresh from the market!) we needed brown sugar (we had to substitute regular sugar), cloves, red pepper, salt, pepper, and we added rosemary and parsley from the herb garden.

Nate prepared the sausage by first mixing all of the dry ingredients together and we improvised based on what was available in our kitchen - 2 teaspoons salt, 1 teaspoon pepper, 1 tablespoon sugar (we should have used less because brown sugar is less sweet than regular), 1/8 teaspoon red pepper flakes, a pinch of crushed cloves, a couple leaves of parsley minced with the herb scissors, and some rosemary.

Dry ingredients for sausage

Patties ready for cooking

Nate added the package of sausage to the dry ingredients and mixed well with his hands. The patties were formed by hand and cooked on a skillet with a tiny bit of olive oil. The patties were cooked for a couple minutes on each side.

Grated potatoes

While Nate was preparing the sausage, I made the hashbrowns using potatoes from the Farmer's Market. The recipe calls for mashed potatoes and if we had some leftover that is what I would have used. Instead, I ended up grating a couple cups worth of potatoes and using that instead. I diced the onion using the vidalia onion chopper to make it easier. I added an egg, salt, and pepper to the potatoes, mixed well and cooked that on the skillet.

Dicing onion

As you can see from these photographs, the sausage patties were cooked on the skillet as well as the hashbrowns. I didn't make the hashbrowns into patties, which would be easy to do with mashed potatoes. Instead, I went for more of a skillet hashbrown that ended up being very tasty. This had to be cooked for longer (about 15 min) since the potatoes were uncooked in the beginning.

The sausage patties were very good - reminded me of Dad's homemade sausage (although he grinds his, and I'm sure it has some sage for flavor). Next time, we'll need to make sure that we have brown sugar or to use less white sugar in it's place. These will make great leftovers for breakfast this week! The hashbrowns were also very good, and if you like onion, then use an entire one in the mix. Yummy breakfast :-)

Online Recipes:
Breakfast Sausage: http://tinyurl.com/ls9npo8

Homemade Hashbrowns: http://tinyurl.com/l4wfpct