You Can't Stuff Turkey Sausage

As I blogged earlier, I purchased a package of Jimmy Dean turkey sausage patties and found them wanting - as in wanting some flavor. The package included 8 patties, and I'd only used 2 in my watery sausage-egg-and-cheese fritatta, so here I was, left with 6 patties.

You know what? The only way to make awful food delicious is to make it fattening.

Hello, biscuits and sausage gravy!

It had been a long time since I'd had biscuits and gravy, mainly because there really isn't a way to make it other than as a batch of biscuits and gravy. I don't know if I typed it here or just in an email to my sister, but in the last month or so, I attempted to make biscuits with Bisquik and failed miserably; the batter/dough just stuck to everything, no matter how much more of the floury mix I tried to throw on it. I decided thereafter to stick to the canned bitches. But I'm really new to this grocery shopping thing (not really, but yes I am inexperienced at many foods that aren't microwaveable, fryable, or boilable). My local Meijer recently had Pillsbury buttermilk canned biscuits on sale, for the low-low price of 2 cans for $2.69, and since the generic cans were $2.39 each, I thought this was a great deal.

For some reason, I thought these things would be like canned soup, with an expiration date a year or two down the road. Nooooo. I noticed, after getting home, of course, that these cans are stamped "USE BEFORE 02JUN12." I really, honestly, wondered if I could freeze them, and no, I would never consider throwing a can in the freezer, because I'm sure it would explode. I'll have to ask my sister what she thinks (although she would probably tell me to just make fresh, since she CAN make them from scratch).

In the meantime, I had to prepare at least one of the cans in its entirety. I followed the instructions, tearing off the entire label (but preserving the heating instructions so I wouldn't have to bother pulling the other can out of the fridge), and pressing the handle of a spoon against a seam. After trying several spots, it finally popped. These were pretty big biscuits. For some reason I thought they'd be much smaller. Anyhow, into the oven.

So I put 4 sausage patties in a skillet. Honestly, these things produce no grease whatsoever. None. I vaguely wondered if they had been treated with some of that RainX shit, that is supposed to repel water from your car windshield. What to do, what to do? Paula Deen would probably say, "Put some butter on it, y'awwwl," so I did. I melted the butter, sprinkled a few teaspoons of flour into that mess and cooked it up. I added about a cup of milk, a bunch of pepper, a few shakes of salt,  brought it to a boil, stirred it around a little.

I probably should have used more milk, or at least had a lower ratio of sausage. The crappy sausage taste still came through, and I had to eat that shit for brunch and dinner on Saturday. The gravy helped a lot.

I should probably do the math on it, because I think the turkey sausage kept this mess from being a fraction as fattening as regular biscuits and gravy. No, the butter didn't help, but the butter most likely wasn't as bad as regular sausage. I don't know.

But I still had 4 biscuits left. Yeah, I know that two biscuits + gravy is a huge portion. When my cats sniffed around, I decided to break up a biscuit and see if they really wanted to eat it. They didn't, but I don't consider that wasting, because after they stuck their noses in it, their noses which they regularly stick into their own and eachother's asses, that biscuit was unsanitary, so throwing it out was more of a safety issue than a wasting one. I put the other biscuits in Tupperware.

On Sunday, I made gravy again, this time with only 2 sausages. Thank goodness that's the last of that sausage. I used more milk and more pepper. The gravy was thinner, but it really tasted much better. Earlier, I googled a recipe for turkey sausage gravy, but the author used mustard (I think dried?) and Worcestershire sauce, and that didn't appeal to me. But now I know -- other people use gross turkey sausage to make an unfuckinghealthy meal.

I don't feel terrible about it. If I hadn't made this, I might have resorted to microwaving some pasta-based meal, not been filled up, and so had another pasta- or rice-based meal.

Turkey, turkey, turkey

I have been neglectful this week. I had some people from my past turn my life into a turmoil, but hopefully, that is all behind me now.

So, I made the parm cheese chicken, using smaller pieces of chicken, egg to coat it, then I cooked it on top of the stove for several minutes before putting it in the oven. It worked! At least in terms of the breading sticking to the chicken. I still left it in the oven for 20 minutes, so it might have been overcooked. I don't know if the stove-top cooking it in a little oil makes it any less fried than baked, but since the original recipe called for baking it in oil, I just don't know. Maybe it's just as well to cook it in a frying pan?

The chicken was  a few days ago. Today I decided on a frittata, with turkey sausage. Turkey sausage tastes like shit - or at least the Jimmy Dean brand tastes like shit. I cooked the sausage, and took a taste, and I thought, "whose bright idea was it to make sausage taste like eating dirty socks?" It is pretty gross. Let me make this clear: I don't like all the grease in regular sausage. When I cook it, I squeeze the cooked patties between paper towels to get some of the grease out, and there's a LOT of grease that squeezes out of regular sausage. The turkey sausage didn't have anywhere near that mess, but it isn't worth eating.

I've never had so much difficulty making a frittata. I used about a half cup of egg sub, which was supposed to approximate 2 eggs. I cut up 2 turkey sausage patties, ate most of one just to taste it, and added the rest to my eggs.  I added some jarred mushroom slices, dried onion, salt, pepper, and once the eggs were solidifying, I sprinkled shredded cheddar on top and put it under the broiler for about 6 minutes, until the cheese started browning. This was the worst frittata I've ever made. It tasted okay, but there was liquid in the bottom of the pan, and that didn't happen when I made this in the past. Maybe because I've made it with ham and the salt in that draws the water. I don't know.

At any rate, the sausage frittata isn't something I will try again. I probably should have just scrambled the eggs with the sausage and threw some cheese on top and microwaved it in a burrito or something. I do not recommend shoe-leather turkey sausage. Then again, I'm not a fan of turkey, so that might be a clue.