Easter Leftovers

My father-in-law called me and said that if we wanted to have dinner at his house on Easter, he left a $20 on the kitchen counter. If I’d like to cook a ham dinner, he said he’d buy the ham. I took him up on the offer and went to the store to buy sides and a ham.

While I was at the store, I noticed the spiral cut hams were in the $15 range, and the whole smoked bone-in hams were $20. Who am I to argue with a good sale? I decided on the 20 lb. bone-in ham, because we’re feeding 4.5 hungry people. I figured that’ll be enough, right? I just made a simple ham with mashed potatoes and corn. Nothing special, but delicious and filling at that. Plus, we get to make one of my favorite things with the leftover ham: Split Pea Soup.

We transported the 15 lb. monster back to the house and I had Split Pea Soup and Deviled Ham on my brain. My wife deboned the ham, leaving plenty of meat for the stock to make soup with. Only problem now is that we don’t have a pot large enough to fit it in. I went to the store and bought a brand-new hacksaw so I could get to work. There’s no way I’m letting that huge bone go to waste. I’ll get that thing chopped up this evening for the bone broth.

For now, I turn my attention to the ham itself. That’s a lot of ham. I separated about three pounds of ham and busted out the old meat grinder. After chopping the ham into manageable cubes, I ground the meat into a large grind. I liked the texture that came out of the large grind. I think that’ll work perfect for a corned beef hash replacement, so I separated it in half by weight and put on the fine grind disc. This came out much more like ground pork. The texture is almost smooth but not quite creamy.

After we cut off a bunch for them to make lunches with and whatnot, we were still left with 3/4 of the ham. He talked to me about how he used to love deviled ham and how he used to make a hashbrown, deviled ham and cheese bake. That sounded delicious and I don’t recall ever having deviled or ground ham that wasn’t spam from a can.

I decided to see how I liked the texture in a 50/50 large grind to small grind mix, and for a spread like deviled ham, I thought it’d be perfect. So, I took a bit of that to experiment with spices, and I gotta admit, it’s not as bad as it seemed like from the beginning. This will be an interesting little experiment. At least I’m using the leftover easter ham for a good cause.