Ham

This is less a recipe and more the way I work with a cooked ham. Holiday hams are great but I often find they are way more than my family can eat in one sitting. Additionally, hams can go on great sales during the non-holiday season and I love to take advantage of a good sale.

I rarely cook/warm a ham in its entirety. Typically, if I pick up a spiral sliced ham, I assess about how much of it I believe will be eaten at a holiday meal and remove that portion from the bone and put in a baking dish to warm and glaze.

Then I remove as much meat from the bone as possible and portion it out in zipper baggies appropriate to meal sizes for my family. I cut off anything tough or too fatty. I freeze the baggies for later meals, often I am able to get 5 or 6 additional meals out of one ham. Then I will take all of the trimmed scraps and the ham bone and put it in a pot, cover it with water and simmer it for 30 minutes to an hour, and strain to create a lovely ham broth which I portion out into pint containers and freeze as well. This broth can be used in soups or to cook beans.

Discard the scraps and bone after boiling.

You can also portion and freeze a carver ham, that does not have a bone.