Tuesday 28 December 2010

Not a vegetarian post...

Ok so, some of you may be wondering exactly why I'm blogging about our christmas ham 3 days AFTER christmas...

Truthfully, we only actually got around to glazing it yesterday.

The reason for this was pure procrastination on my part. Having never done a christmas ham in my life before, or even paid attention the last couple of years when someone was doing it in my vicinity - well, I was nervous.

And since Mainfreight was kind enough to give their employees 4.5 kg cooked hams this year (something the more generous companies do as a tradition) when most companies played the 'recession' card... I REALLY didn't want to mess it up.

On the other hand, I didn't want to approach the whole thing armed with someone else's recipe. Just because I had never done this before didn't mean I couldn't figure it out right?

Wrong...


After much research and discussion with The Man about how this particular cooking process worked, figuring out the reasons behind the various ingredients and tastes, and eventually deciding what we wanted and didn't want.

This is what happened.

We rubbed the entire thing down with Dijon Mustard.

Or rather, The Man did.

For the record - The Man did most of this.
 Yum!

I have to make a rather important point though. Christmas traditions in the southern hemisphere should really be rethought. Christmas baking and glazing of hams is all good and well if the temperatures are in the minuses outside. But when it's 30 degrees Celsius and the humidity levels are up in the high eighties, bulk baking is not fun. At all.
Neither is the five hours of heat pumping from  your oven while glazing a ham!

I decided I liked a pineapple taste with christmas ham. So we poured about 500 mls of pineapple juice over and around the ham.
 Lots of pineapple!
 And then I covered it loosely in foil and shoved it in the oven at 160 degrees Celsius for a few hours...

...turning it every so often, and replenishing the pineapple juice when it looked like it was necessary.
After about 3 hours of sweltering heat The Man took it out, removed the rind, scored it and studded it with cloves.
He then poured my concoction of pineapple juice, honey, brown sugar and mustard over it.
 Looks good at this point huh?
 He was meticulous!
But!

In the end it wasn't crisping...

...the ham had been in the oven for almost 5 hours...

...and my suggestion of turning on the grill and moving the ham to a higher position in the oven resulted in a burnt (yet surprisingly still not crisp) layer on the top.

After a very intense discussion, The Man and I decided to quit while we were (relatively) ahead.

It was still very yummy!

4 comments:

  1. I love the way you have all those Christmas cook books and do your own thing, even though you've never cooked it before! I'm like that too.

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  2. Thanks Carol! I'm a learn-by-trial-and-error kind of girl... Next year I'm toying with the idea of doing it with apple cider. I think that would be a good combination don't you?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Aaah Renette! You are such a sweetie:) The closest I ever got to cooking and glazing a ham was when I boiled one and grilled the result. Which tasted ok-ish, but looked awful, I think I'm better at eating the ham rather than cooking it...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Oooh... found one recipe where you boil it in beer which sounded intriguing!
    And I KNOW I'm better at eating the ham rather than cooking it - thank goodness The Man is so handy in the kitchen!

    ReplyDelete

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