Lingering in my deep freezer for the last year has been an enormous whole bone in ham. I have included it many times in my monthly menus but hadn't gotten around to actually cooking it. Looking to be even more frugal in this coming year I decided it was time that ham was used. Besides a year is really the max for quality. The ham I had looked identical to this:
quite a hunk of meat n'est-pas? Just thinking of dealing with it exhausted me. But I put on my big girl panties and got to work. I poured a bottle of beer over it and using my largest roaster put this in a 350 degree oven for three hours. I mixed up a quick glaze of brown sugar, mustard, and vinegar. Once the glaze had melted I served the ham with mashed potatoes and green beans. To two people. Yes only two of us for dinner. The ham was quite tasty, moist and not very salty. However with the exception of a small missing section it still looked pretty much like that picture above. I sighed deeply, covered it with foil, and stuck it in the cooler on GF'S screened in porch.
This morning I faced the fact that I was going to have to break that monster down. A large sharp knife, a pile of zip lock baggies, my food processor, and cutting board and I was ready. Forty minutes later and I had two bags of ham slices, three bags of ham cubes, two bags of ground ham, and the bone broken into two pieces and wrapped in foil for soup making.
A bag of cubes and one of ground went into GF'S freezer, the slices went into his refrigerator and the remainder is going home with me. We will get several more meals out of this in the next couple of months, easing the meat portion of the food budget considerably. 
