Living in the United Kingdom for the past four years has been a wonderful experience, but I love Southern-style foods and I especially miss Southern breakfast fare! So with the proverbial American “can do” attitude, I thought to myself, “How hard can this be?”

One of my latest cravings has been “Jimmy Dean Sausage,” the original sage recipe that can be fried and served in the following ways: as sausage patties served alongside a couple of eggs and/or pancakes or stuffed inside a tasty buttermilk biscuit. Mmmmm! You can also crumble the fried sausage and scramble it with eggs and cheese, or add it as a vital ingredient in a sausage and egg breakfast casserole, or make sausage gravy so good it’ll make you slap your granny. It also makes an exciting pizza topping! So after a quick search on Google, I had a copycat recipe!

Here it is, step by step:

1 – Gather the following ingredients:

• 16 ounces ground pork (500 grams pork mince)
• 1 teaspoon salt
• ½ teaspoon dried parsley
• ¼ teaspoon rubbed sage
• ¼ teaspoon black pepper
• ¼ teaspoon dried thyme
• ¼ teaspoon crushed red pepper
• ¼ teaspoon coriander
• ¼ teaspoon MSG (optional & almost impossible to find in the UK)

2 – Combine spices into a small dish and mix together

3 – Put the ground pork into a mixing bowl. You could simply increase your spice measurements very slightly, rounding the 1/4 teaspoons rather than level measures. After mixing your spices thoroughly, sprinkle it evenly over the top of the pork and blend it completely into the meat. I prefer to use one hand, squeezing it through my fingers over and over until it is thoroughly mixed. Most of us in the British culture weigh our bulk ingredients in grams or kilograms (1,000 grams), so form meatballs weighing about 50 grams each. Ground pork (called “mince” in the UK) is usually packaged in 500 gram parcels, so this recipe will make about a dozen portions of sausage.

4 – Flatten the meatballs into small patties or burgers. You should be able to get 10 sausage patties with a 500g package of pork: more if you make them smaller. These are quite large, so use your own judgment on the size. I put these on a metal tray and freeze them, then I put them in freezer bags. This way you will have individual portions without them sticking together in the freezer. You could freeze the entire 500g, but it would take significant time to defrost and I don’t like to risk pork sitting out for several hours.

5 – Fry until well done. This ASDA-label British pork mince is extremely lean (less than 7% fat), so I had to use a little cooking oil in the pan. I’m going to ask my local butcher if he can grind me a 20% fat mixture, which would make it easier to cook without oil. My mouth is watering at this point, because it’s the first time in years that I have smelled American-style pork sausage cooking in my house. Yippee!!

6 – Serve alongside two fried eggs. When anyone asks me how I like my eggs, I always say, “side by side!” I also had toast (not shown in the photo above), grumbling that I didn’t have some buttermilk biscuits to go with this wonderful meal.

[Note: Click on any of the thumbnail images to see them larger on my Flickr site.]

PS: You might enjoy reading about the culture shock we experienced when we began to shop for groceries in the United Kingdom. So many items we could not find on the shelves! Just because they have super Wal-Mart here (called ASDA in the UK) doesn’t mean you can get your fried pork rinds, beef jerky, shotgun shells, Hanes Red Label, and a quick oil/lube while you wait.