Honey Mustard Glazed Ham

Guys. It's April. How the heck did that happen? Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to see this winter in the rearview mirror, but it somehow seems like it was just January at the same time?

April is just also sort of a bit of an anxiety month. On the farm, we're getting ready for the craziness that comes in May with calving and seeding. And so April sort of feels like this constant state of trying to get everything ready but also feeling like you're forgetting a hundred important things at the same time. Do we have all the calving supplies we need? Is all the seed and fertilizer organized? What all has to be done for maintenance?

And then there's me. I'm a tax accountant. I don't need to explain what April means in my world.

But! April also feels like a month of promise. So much anticipation about what's to come from the growing season, and the excitement of knowing there will be baby calves running around before long. Plus, Easter!

Ham is a pretty classic Easter dish. When I was writing this post, I got to wondering about how that came to be. So many traditions we have seem to have some sort of obscure roots. So I did a bit of Google searching and know what I found out about why hams are a traditional Easter dish?

Because they were available. That's literally all I found. How boring. Something about the pigs getting butchered in the fall and then the hams were finished curing by Easter. Which is okay I guess, but I was really hoping for a weird story about some eccentric British king that vehemently hated chicken and banned it across the country on holidays or something. I dunno. Not sure what I was expecting, but "because it was there" just wasn't it..

Anyways, on to the ham that I made! I really wanted to try a honey mustard glaze on it. I don't know what it is about honey mustard, but to me it is just the king of sauces, and I will forever be angry at McDonald's for not having it as a sauce option.

So I cruised a bunch of recipes, picked a couple ingredients I liked from each and threw some of them together. And it happened to turn out! So here's all you do to make a fabulous glazed ham:

1. Score the ham and put it in a 325F oven.
2. Mix all the glaze ingredients together.
3. Pour glaze on the ham during the last hour of cooking. Repeat as necessary.

And that's it! The ham that I cooked was 3.25 lbs, and it took about two hours to cook. Most of our hams are more in that 5lbs range, so you probably want to allow three hours for those. I cooked it to about 145F, and let it rest for 10 minutes and it came up to 150F while it rested. Now, food safety in Canada says you should cook pork to 160F. So I'm not saying you should cook it to any less than that, I'm just telling you what temp I cooked it to. And I obviously lived to write this blog, so the decision is all yours.

Leftover ham is great to have. I made sure to cook it on a Sunday so that we would have it for quick and easy sandwiches for lunch all that week. So what did we do? Put the leftovers in the beer fridge and promptly forgot about them until Thursday. Classic.

But seriously, there are a lot of different things you can do with leftover ham. Ham and grilled cheese. Chopped up in scrambled eggs. Or my personal favourite: ham and egg mcmuffin.

Now in my mish-mashing of recipes, I ended up making one cup of glaze. And let me tell you, you do not need anywhere near that much glaze for a 3.25lb ham. Like a third of it probably would have done the trick.

So I put all the leftover glaze in my fridge. Now, normally when I do that, it migrates to the back of the fridge, not to be seen again for three months until I finally toss it. But not this time. This time I had a plan. A few days later I cooked up a couple porkchops to use up the leftover sauce - seared them for about 5-6 minutes on each side, then poured the leftover glaze on top and let them simmer in the sauce until they were cooked the rest of the way through. Served with rice, and turned out pretty good!

Moral of this story: you can have absolutely no idea what you're doing and still create some pretty dang delicious food.