Cooking Baking Eating

Well, do you count something as a failure if you’ve learned something in the process? The Whole30 (elimination diet) I talked about before actually became a Whole8 instead, mostly because I was feeling sicker and sicker every day when I was doing the diet. Most people start an elimination diet because they’re trying to heal what makes them feel sick, where it just plain old made me sick.

So after a week, I decided I needed to not be so strict and pick one thing at a time to eliminate instead of more than one. The dominant theory between my husband and I is that it was too much of a shock to the system. Oh well. I still think the Whole30 is a great program, I just couldn’t deal with feeling sick any longer.

If you do decide to do this type of diet, you will learn a LOT about yourself in the process. Here are a few things I learned in one short week:

• My cravings for sugar will go away quite quickly once I stop feeding them.
• Eating out while eliminating is almost impossible, it’s easier to eat at home and know what you’re eating than take the chance on messing yourself up.
• Pre-cooking, or just even preparing in advance, is essential to keep up with that kind of diet. You don’t have to really know how to cook, just having a plan of attack helps.
• Bigger breakfasts without refined carbs (cereal, toast, ect.) will keep me full until lunch. My favorite breakfast included sweet potato hash, two fried eggs, and turkey sausage.

Out of all the recipes that I’ve done for that week, my favorite has to be the turkey sausage. Normally my body does NOT like sausage. I think it might be the overall fattiness that sausage generally has. I love the flavor, but it does NOT love me at all. There are other people in my family that has the same problem so at least I’m not alone in my suffering.

Stupid genetics.

I like the turkey sausage since I can buy the leaner turkey and control the fat content (which is probably what bothers me) as well as the spices.

Since the recipe was an experiment, I just kept the sausage mixture in a plastic tub in the fridge and scooped it out as needed. It even tastes great when added to my sweet potato hash. As an added bonus, the husband likes it as well.

I had to google recipes for sausage to find a starting point, mostly because I had no idea what type of spices even went into sausage! I used that as a general guideline and put my own spin on it. Since I used turkey, it seems sage is generally the dominant flavor but I also added some extras to give it more depth of flavor. I added an egg thinking that it will hold the mixture together more into patties, but I think that is actually optional so don’t add it if you’re not eating eggs. (Just be more delicate about flipping!

With my next batch I’m tempted to cook up a whole bunch of little patties and freeze them so that all we have to do is heat them up during the week.

So tasty!

Turkey Sausage

• 1 pound lean ground turkey (I prefer 93/7)
• 2 teaspoons dried sage
• 1/4 teaspoon granulated garlic
• 1/4 teaspoon granulated onion
• 1/2 teaspoon salt (or add less if you’re looking for low salt)
• 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
• 1 egg (optional, but holds the mix together more)

1. Add all ingredients together and mix well. Cook as either patties or crumbles