New #14: Bake a Ham

Last Sunday was Easter, and to get in the spirit Ben and I decided to take on a ham. A ham's butt, to be exact. This was really mostly a new of opportunity. We found it on sale that morning for $5. It was too good of a deal - and too much of an adventure - to pass up.

Let's get this started, ham.

Without consulting a recipe, Ben just somehow knew how to cook the ham. He says it's from all the cooking shows he watches. I say it's from a little deal with the culinary devil. Either way, he put me to work right away making our basting sauce. With butter, brown sugar and cinnamon, this was probably the most delicious thing I've ever had the pleasure of melting together. And to top it off, I got to saute some pineapple slices in its sweetness that were later pinned onto our dear ol' ham.

So far, the process was easy enough. And to my surprise, things just kept getting more simple. With the oven preheated to about 400 degrees, we just plopped the ham in a pan and closed the door. Viola!

There was only one little hiccup along the way. Ben told me that to keep it from drying out (and to keep it delicious), we needed to baste the butt every 15 minutes. For me, the culinary cripple, this was probably the hardest part. For some reason I had a lot of troubling slurping up the sauce in the baster. All jokes aside, it kept prematurely shooting out. And once I did have a squeeze full, my aim for the ham was just pathetic. Sadly, much of our sauce of sugar and spice and everything nice ended up on the inside of the oven - a sticky mess for me to clean up sometime in the faraway future. But still, some of the sauce made it on, and after an hour and 15 minutes of cookin', our ham was ready for some cuttin'.

Looks can be deceiving. There really wasn't much to smile about when it came to Sarah basting.

Ben had the honor of carving our feast. Somehow I didn't see myself excelling in that area, so I was happy he took it from there. About half way through the carving we snuck our first bites of the bounty. I'm happy to say IT WAS SO GOOD! I don't even like ham that much and I was in hog heaven. In fact, our ham lent the perfect Easter dinner conversation. Throughout the entire meal we just talked about how great it tasted and what an awesome job we'd done.

Ta Da!