Tonight’s Menu – Ham with trimmings

What’s on the Hectic Kitchen table tonight?

We’re starting the new year off with a Cook’s Half Shank Ham that I got on sale during the week of Christmas. With the holiday falling in the middle of the week, and two traditional holiday meals (Wednesday and Saturday), I had lots of opportunities to go shopping. I also took advantage of all the sales that I could. As I’ve mentioned before, we eat a lot of chicken in the Hectic Household. We also eat a lot of pork. While we live in beef country, if I don’t have half a beef in the freezer I tend to lean towards the lower cost chicken and pork. Ham is definitely a family favorite. In fact, the other night my wife took an informal poll around the table as to whether we’re a turkey or ham family. The vote was split down the middle, with two members of the family not here.

As a kid, I remember a lot of the hams being very salty, but I haven’t had that issue with the Cook’s hams. For a ham of this sort, you cook it at 325F for 20-25 minutes per pound. This was a nearly 13 pound ham, so fortunately I remembered to put it in just after lunch. If I hadn’t we would have been eating at a not-unheard-of 9:00pm or later. Good thing the kids don’t have school tomorrow (they go back Monday), eh?

To complement the ham, we’re going to have “Those Potatoes”. This is a name that has stuck because nobody could remember the official name, Roasted Red Potatoes with Bacon & Cheese. This is a Kraft Foods recipe that we’ve only modified by increasing the cook time from 55 minutes to 75 minutes and doubling the cheese to one cup. Tonight will be an adventure, as the only potatoes in the house are Russets. We’re going to find out how well they withstand the cooking process in this type of dish. In addition, we didn’t have enough bacon bits, so we’re augmenting them with diced pepperoni. So pretty much we’re having an entirely new concoction…but don’t tell my family. We’ll just see if they notice!

One of the tools that we’ll use tonight is the Progressive Fruit & Vegetable chopper. I absolutely love this gadget. I had to hunt through our drawers to find the handy cleaning tool, since it was misidentified and put with the regular silverware. Why? That’s not a question I ask when I’m hunting in the Hectic Kitchen for tools, gadgets, or whatever. If I didn’t have to clean it, then a little bit of investigative work is worth the trade-off for not having to wash & dry.

I washed the potatoes, sliced them lengthwise and across their middles (quartering them) and then cubed them in the Progressive chopper. From start to finish, the chopping took two minutes for nearly three pounds of potatoes (mostly because I forgot that the recipe called for two pounds and I was too lazy to come back to look). That’s pretty fast work for cubing that many potatoes, in case you didn’t know!