Baked Virginia Ham and Goodbye for Now on December 25
After reading the most recent issue of Saveur magazine, I decided to buy a Virginia ham for Bruce for Christmas. Bruce loves anything porky, and neither of us has ever tasted a real ham before so it was something to look forward to. After watching the instructional videos on the website: Virginia Traditions we were ready to tackle our ham. It was a 13.9 lb. beast that was covered in netting, wrapped in parchment paper, and covered in a burlap bag. We could smell the smoke the minute it was opened. We decided to bake the ham as opposed to simmering it in water. We also chose not to soak it overnight. Once the ham was scrubbed of all mold (we removed the netting), we put it in the oven at 325 F for 4 hours. I made a glaze of molasses, honey, mustard, rum, apple juice, and a few habanero flakes.
We let the ham cool off for about 30 minutes, and then I removed the skin, scored the fat, glazed it, and put it back in the oven for 30 minutes at 300 F.
I then sliced the ham as thin as I could and served it with potatoes au gratin, and the leftover cranberries from Thanksgiving.
Bruce made a salad of mixed greens, turnips, radishes, green onions, and carrot. the dressing was lambrusco vinaigrette and the wine was our very last bottle of 2004 Tobin James ‘Fat Boy’ Zinfandel. The house has smelled like smoked meat for the past two days and there is plenty of ham leftover. It was a fun experience to try a real ham from Virginia. This meal was the last one I will be cooking in this house. Bruce & I are leaving for New York City on 12/28 to celebrate the new year and to send me off to attend culinary school starting January 4 (Italian Culinary Academy). We have the house up for sale and Bruce might be moving while I am in school (for the next 7 months). This blog has been a fun project for me, and I hope those of you who read it have enjoyed it as well. We have had many enjoyable meals over the past 2 years, and we accomplished what we set out to do. I affirmed that I really have a passion for cooking. When I graduate from culinary school, I will be a trained chef looking to do what I love for a living instead of a hobby. I will be blogging about my adventures in school, but not here. I will do one last post to provide the link to the new blog once I get it up and running. Happy New Year and best wishes for all goals, desires, and dreams to be achieved in the new decade. The best promises you can keep are the ones you make to yourself!! Ciao e a presto.
Squid Ink Pasta with Seared Scallops, Prawns, and Halibut on December 24
Seafood for dinner has been a tradition for Christmas Eve in our house for many years. The dish always varies based on what’s available. I went to Local Ocean earlier in the day and bought some fresh halibut, gulf prawns, and Alaskan scallops. I seasoned the seafood with fennel salt, fennel pollen, ground New Mexican red chile, smoked paprika, and black pepper, and seared everything in olive oil. I made a cream sauce with white wine, saffron, lemon juice, FPP, smoked paprika, red chile, fennel, shallot, chopped parsley, and garlic. I tossed the cooked pasta in the sauce and served the seafood on top.
Bruce made a salad of arugula, radicchio, romaine, dandelion, radish, turnips, green onions, carrot, black olives, goat cheese, fried capers, and toasted pumpkin seeds. The dressing was a blood orange vinaigrette and the wine was a very delicious bottle of Billecart Salmon Brut Rose champagne.
Who We Are
Sunburned and full!
My husband, Bruce, and I live on the beautiful Oregon Coast. We are passionate home cooks and make dinner from scratch almost every night of the week. We shop the farmer’s market, buy as much from local producers as we can, and support the organic, sustainable, and Slow Food movements. We believe that knowing where your food comes from, cooking from scratch, eating well, in season, and together at the table are all part of living healthy. You won’t find many foods from the middles aisles of the grocery store in our house!! This blog is an account of our home-cooked meals for the year 2008 (and now 2009). The way it works is I prepare the main entree’ (I usually don’t follow a recipe–I like to think of recipes as reference and use them to generate ideas) while Bruce usually makes a salad to match. We eat the salad after we eat the main entree’. We learned to eat that way when we visited Italy and prefer it now. We always have a bottle of wine with dinner, so we’ve documented it as well. We don’t go by what’s best with white or red, we just drink what we like. This project started in December 2007 when there were many discussions regarding the frequency in which favorite dishes were made. We determined that the best way to know how often we ate pasta with Bolognese sauce (or anything else) was to document it. We have been doing just that in a journal since January 1, 2008. I then decided that it would be better to put it on a blog; not for public attention, but for easier storage management and transferability of the data. If you happen to stumble across this blog and find it interesting, or would like to know how we made something, let me know–I am happy to share.
