Make your own Italian Sausage

For our big family Christmas Eve dinner festivities, we all decided to bring soups to share.

I've been craving a good sausage lentil soup lately, so that was my pick.

As I reached in the freezer for the package of sausage (one of my many great coupon finds!), I realized it wasn't flavored. Ugh. Please don't make me go back to the grocery store on the morning of Christmas Eve.

Thanks to an Italian Sausage Recipe I found online, I was able to turn my regular old pork sausage into flavorful Italian Sausage! The internet saved the day!

How to make your own Italian Sausage from regular Pork Sausage

In a glass bowl with an airtight lid, add the following ingredients and refrigerate over night:
(I only had just under 1 lb of pork sausage, so I halved the ingredients below, minus a dash)

2 lbs pork
1 Tbsp salt
1 Tbsp ground fennel seed
1-1/2 Tbsp paprika
1 Tbsp minced garlic
1 Tbsp sugar
1 tsp black pepper
3 Tbsp red wine vinegar

Mush ingredients all around in your raw pork and refrigerate over night in an airtight container to increase the flavor absorption. Cook normally the next day.


We even ground our own fennel seed with a mortar and pestle. Fancy, I know. It smelled SO good! Like licorice actually. I couldn't believe how fragrant it was.

Incidentally, the soup was a fiasco, so I'll spare you from that recipe. Midway through cooking, it seemed too bland so we added a bunch more flavorings. In the end, it ended up being way too salty and we didn't eat much of it. Drat! Note to self for next year's Christmas Eve dinner dish? Keep it simple!

Hope your holiday was happy and bright!

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