Recipes

A holiday ham doesn’t have only one part to play in your end-of-the-year celebrations. Check out these great ham appetizer ideas for passing around at family gatherings — all finger food and easy to execute.

Ham Appetizers You Won’t Be Able to Pass Up

Ham and Cheese in Puff Pastry

From Ina Garten, The Food Network.
This is one of my all-time favorite holiday appetizers. It starts with premade puff pastry and comes out of the oven bubbling and delicious. (I especially like it because it doesn’t involve filling little individual quiche cups or wrapping dozens of shrimp in bacon. Who has time?)
You can vary the cheese — cheddar is great for a more kid-friendly version, as is part-skim mozzarella — and any hard cheese could substitute for Gruyere. Yum!

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A nicely cooked ham is beautiful to behold. But how do you prepare the absolute, #1 Best Tasting Ham?

Borrowing advice from the ham-savvy Serious Eats Food Lab, it’s easy:
1) Buy the right ham, and
2) Don’t screw it up.
Fair enough.
But, seriously, ham needn’t be a complex dish. With these simple tips, you’re guaranteed to have success.  (more…)

Helping your holiday ham taste its best!

Sometimes foods with distinct flavors need counterpoints to bring out the best taste combinations. Whether it’s strong coffee in barbecue sauce, a pinch of hot pepper in Mexican cocoa, or a splash of balsamic vinegar on a bowl of freshly sliced strawberries, these culinary marriages will delight your taste buds!
Such is the case with ham. . . salty, smoky, and succulent it pairs wonderfully with sour fruit (pineapple, orange, cranberries, currants, rhubarb), sweet elements (brown sugar, maple syrup, honey, even cola!) and spices (cloves, mustard, (more…)

Just like I’ll fight (nicely, of course) the other cooks at the Thanksgiving table for possession of that flavorful turkey carcass — such a great way to make stock — I do the same at Easter for the leftover ham bone.
These rainy April days are the perfect time to take that ham bone out of the freezer and put it to good use for some great tasting and heart warming comfort food.
Bean soups especially benefit from a long simmer with a leftover ham bone, whether or not there’s much meat left on it. If there is, that’s just a bonus; slice it off at the end and add it to the soup.
Allow at least two hours for each of these home cooked soups, and know that they’re just as good (more…)

Something has been going around my office, church and social circles, and it’s not a funny Facebook meme. Everyone seems to be coming down with a strange cold-flu hybrid, an exhausting, hacking, miserable illness that takes a good week to work its way out.
When you’re sick, the last thing you might feel like doing is cooking soups. But if you happen to be the healthy one — or if, like me, you’ve already recovered from the plague and are ready to help your sniffling family or even your coworkers — one of these soups should do the trick.

1. Chicken Noodle Soup
This is the soup I made two weeks ago when I was guzzling NyQuil at night and curling up with tea during the day. Alton Brown uses chicken stock (homemade if you’ve got it), a few savory (more…)

There are so many holiday party options. What about a perfectly browned turkey or a glazed holiday ham, sliced into layers like the petals of a flower. Either makes for a crowd-pleasing main course, ample enough to feed a crowd, with leftovers to spare.
But when you’re hosting a holiday gathering (that isn’t Thanksgiving — turkey has the clear edge there), which do you choose for your centerpiece? What makes better appetizers for a cocktail party?
If your gathering is less than two weeks after Thanksgiving, everyone might be happier with ham. A spiral-sliced, smoked bone-in or boneless ham comes already cooked, so all you have to do is warm it up, glaze it and serve.
Hosting a cocktail party? For appetizers, ham is a little more decadent than turkey.
For example, I served ham and cheese puff pastry squares (recipe by Ina Garten on the Food Network) for my New Year’s Eve party in 2010. They were finger food, easy to make and fantastic with sparkling wine.
If you have picky eaters or anyone who keeps (more…)