Kitchen Cats: Easter Ham Dinner

This is a back-dated post of our Easter dinner over 3 weeks ago. Immediately after Easter, I started a week of being on call, then had a day and a half to scramble to pack for our trip to Maui, wedding, and Australia honeymoon! I promise more posts to come of our eating adventures across the globe.

But first I will tell the frustrating story of our Easter ham. Last year, with Dan's parents in town on Easter for a Braves-Cubs game, I made an Easter dinner of ham studded with cloves (in his oven), and sweet potato oven fries, bulgur salad, and apple pie (in my oven). Remember that the ham was quite easy, I tried it again this year in our monster, dysfunctional oven. And I had a monster, dysfunctional experience. I made a dry rub of brown sugar, cumin, salt, and spices, and placed the ham in a roasting pan where the drippings of juice and sugar started to burn and char the pan, eventually filling the kitchen with smoke. I filled the bottom of the roasting pan with water a few times, but the water kept evaporating away, leaving more char on the bottom of the pan. And the frustrating thing was that this ham was not cooking! At 15-20 minutes per pound, this ham was supposed to take less than 3 hours, but after that amount of time, the inside was barely hotter than a summer day. So it took lots of cooking, lots of burning to get this ham safe to eat.

Surprisingly the inside was well cooked and good. Although very salty. I did not like eating this ham at all, but on the bright side we got some good leftover dishes out of it (see next posts!) And the apple cake for dessert made up for everything.

Easter Ham