The Ultimate Easter Dinner
For those of you of the Easter persuasion (this is definitely not kosher) let me show you how to make an Easter ham that will have your family talking for years. This recipe is one that my brother the chef taught me a few years ago. His chef life included every kind of cooking, including banquets and brunches, and this was a way to get your hot line ham to stand out from everybody else's Sunday brunch or Easter hot line. Obviously, I don't cook this for myself, too much food, but if you are going to have a crowd at the Easter dinner table, this will be a spectacular hit. I eat ham very rarely (usually when I'm getting ready to make a big pot of split pea soup to freeze) and find the smaller commercial hams to taste mostly like chemicals (yes, including your spiral sliced honey glazed numbers,) so this will be an elevated ham experience for you. You need a bone in ham for this (which definitely means great pea soup to follow, along with spectacular sandwiches for a week.) The ham only needs to be heated through (they are already cured and smoked) so this needn't take a lot of time. A 12 pound ham will take about 2 hours at 350. Use a high quality ham, like a Smithfield (which will need to be soaked in cold water in the fridge for the night before preparation, unless you are used to really salty Virginia hams.) When you've drained your Smithfield, pat it dry and let it air dry for 30 minutes.
Remove any loose caul fat, the kind that flakes off. With a boning knife, begin cutting a cavity ( just some space, really) all around the bone from the broad end of the ham, as far down into the joint as you can reach. Stuff this cavity with as much fresh rosemary (it must be the fresh stuff, buy a couple of those little plastic packs they have in the produce section of the grocery) as you can fit into it and then try a little harder. Put your ham fat side up in your roasting pan. Score the fat lightly, just down to but not into the meat, in a diamond pattern. Glaze the fat side with a mixture of a half cup of honey and a quarter cup of Dijon mustard and then insert cloves into the scoring where the diamonds intersect. Roasting time will depend on the size of the ham, but the guideline I gave above will give you a ham which is hot but still moist.
As I said, I've never been much of a ham eater (and was a little dismayed that he was making ham for Easter that year) but this was so good that I couldn't stop eating it. It takes a prosaical dish and turns it into ambrosia.
Serve my Three Cheese Scalloped Potatoes with this and Green Beans Amandine and you will hear that most lovely of sounds to a cook's ears: utter silence at the table, broken only by the sound of silverware on plates. When the eating is too good to be broken up with conversation, you have acheived cook nirvana. That and the fact that you will have leftovers that are only better the next day.