How Much Ham?

     The Christmas ham turned out fine, despite trouble keeping one side of my indirect-heat divided fire going on the grill.

     You see, I was still getting over my cold or flu when I shopped for Christmas dinner on the 23rd, thinking I'd pick up last minute stuff the next day before work.  As it happened, I felt so awful on the 24th that I worked from home, napped, and then got paged into work in the evening dues to an emergency.  By then I felt at least halfway human -- but the stores were long closed.

     The previous evening, it was more like a quarter human when I hit the other foodiemart.  Maybe a third.  I looked at the hams, which were more or less sorted into a pile of sweeter ones and a pile of savory, and picked a likely-looking hunk of well-smoked hog from the savory side without reading the details.

     It was seven and a half pounds!  That left barely enough room in the big oval baking pan for a couple of cut-up potatoes, along with multicolored carrots, celery and an onion.  With a foil tent mostly covering it, the exit vent on my covered grill was partially blocked, and I ended up turning the pan every half-hour, while re-lighting the charcoal on the cool side with a split of kindling.  It never stayed burning for long.

     The good side is that it kept the temperature low enough to avoid burning; the grill can hit 400°F with a careful fire and you want more like 325° to bake a ham -- it's already cooked; you're just warming it all the way to the bone.

     Once it was done, Tam and I ate our fill and had, I don't know, probably seven pounds of ham left.  Two big freezer bags of ham and vegetables will reappear as soup or stew; another freezer bag of plain ham, with the bone, is going into fifteen-bean soup.  And the rest?  I had a ham, cheese and mushroom omelet this morning, and I just might make ham hash for breakfast tomorrow -- and there will still be plenty left.

     All this, and I still have to hunt up a corned beef brisket for New Years.