Chicken Sausage Meatballs

We all love sausage around here. Since I am cutting calories, 200 a pop for one patty seems a bit high. So, I did a little snooping and found some techniques for making chicken sausage. I know you can purchase the gourmet variety, but making it myself is cheaper and allows me to control the fat content and flavor. I made mine nice and spicy!

I made two servings of meatballs from my sausage. Each serving is 8 small meatballs. These are good alone for breakfast, or any meal, I suppose. I am also planning to make some Italian Wedding Soup with them, minus the pasta of course. They would be excellent with some marinara sauce over zucchini noodles. Yes, this is a little more work than many of my recipes, but they are amazingly good. Of course, you can use the chicken mixture in place of any pork sausage recipe as well.

I started with regular boneless skinless chicken breast and borrowed my mom's Ninja blender system to grind it. This machine handled the grinding very well, although it did not grind the fennel seeds as much as I would have liked.

Chicken Sausage

1 pound boneless skinless chicken breasts
1 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
2 teaspoons fennel seed
1 T dried parsley
1/8 teaspoon crushed red pepper
2 teaspoons paprika
1 teaspoon powdered sage
1/2 teaspoon Italian seasoning
1 1/2 T cider vinegar

Add all the dried seasonings to the blender and mix well. Add vinegar and chicken. Process until finely ground. Form into patties, balls, or crumble. Optional: use ground chicken and blend spices in by hand.

I used my Pampered Chef scoop to easily make meatballs. Because these have so little fat, I steam fried the balls with the occasional addition of a few tablespoons of water.

My boy is still ailing, and tonight John and I both have a bit of a sore throat. Hope that doesn't mean anything...