Mmmmm ham

Happened in one of the local grocers yesterday and discovered that the leftover mega sized Smithfield hams were on a managers special. We're talking about the 18+lb hams that well, honestly I regularly only saw at this size at this particular store out of the Lord only knows how many other stores there are in this area. Anyways, price was good enough that even though we already had a similar sized ham [late December purchase] in the freezer, we decided to snag one up and cook it off today. With the after results, I decided to write up this blog, as we were pleasantly surprised with what we found once we'd cooked and carved it.

I didn't see Andrea put it into the oven, as I was busy with homework, but helped her take it out and unwrap it. Just to clarify, it's a Smithfield foil wrapped spiral cut ham. Upon unwrapping it, you see instead of the normal half of a ham that so many of the others come as, one of this size is a complete from shoulder to foreleg ham. On each end is a chunk of meat that was not spiral cut, we like to use these chunks for soups and omelets. I cut off the smaller of the two chunks and began to make my way down the slices when I noticed some wiggling in the bone. Honestly, we had thought that it might be one solid bone, but nope, there was the knee! Popped off the foreleg and chucked that into a freezer bag with the chunks to make soup later on. Layer after layer after layer of tender slices of ham. Most of that was freezer bagged, a bunch of it went to dinner for us and one of our roommates tonight, and some is awaiting being used in various meals over the weekend. This took me up to the second chunk, the larger of the two, and after removing a fist sized piece of meat, we found...the shoulder bone! :D This gave us three bones to boil down for broth, I'm sure the rejoicing would be a bit strange to some people, as I've found quite a few sadly throw out the bones and even throw out the large chunk of meat attached to the bone. Woe is for them, but that sure made us happy! The shoulder bone and chunks quickly found their way into the freezer, and the thigh bone found itself in a big stock pot, which has been boiling for the last couple of hours.

So maybe we're the only one's excited about this, but this is part of changing the habits of people. We'll use the entire ham, and figure we'll turn that 20lb ham into a dozen or more meals for 2-3 people. For the broth being made now, it's going into a ham and potato soup, the two bones in the freezer will meet with various types of beans, and the rest of the ham will be portioned out here and there.