Ham Roast

One myth that has been widely perpetuated is that cooking from scratch takes a lot of time and effort. However, in many cases this is really the furthest thing from the truth. In reality this myth has been encouraged by the fast food industry and the manufacturers of convenience foods. But both have ulterior motives and that is to sell you a more expensive product to pad their profits. One way they do this is to convince you cooking from scratch takes too much time hoping you will buy into the myth. A nice home cooked meal from scratch can easily be make in short period of time for a fraction of the cost of either fast food or convenience foods.

Ham with Diana Sauce

We have been eating mainly from our freezer and pantry stocks to free up some space. Our bulk meat purchases (beef, pork) will be ready to pick up the end of the week, fishing season is starting and fresh produce from the garden is just around the corner. A few nights ago I decided to cook up our last ham.

Ham is one of those meats many don't consider other than lunchmeat outside of special occasions. I don't understand this because any leftover ham can easily be sliced for sandwiches eliminating the need to buy expensive lunchmeat.

I cooked the ham starting from frozen in my countertop roaster in about 75 minutes. Had the ham been thawed it would have take about the same amount of time as the potatoes, 45 minutes so this is quite a doable meal to put together when you get home from work. By the time you have unwound dinner is ready. About 20 minutes before the ham was ready I simply poured a little Diana sauce ( honey garlic) over the ham. I didn't bother thickening the juices either choosing instead to just ladle a little over the ham.

Ham Dinner

If you have been following this blog you already know there are a lot of preserving recipes here. What isn't always clear is how exactly we use some of these home canned or home frozen products. How to use some of the home preserved products is rather intuitive but what about the products like Old Fashioned Chili Sauce? So I am going to be making a bit more of an effort to show you how we use these products.

The meal as pictured was entirely from our pantry and freezers. I served the ham with whole potatoes cooked with the ham and home frozen nibblet corn. Topping the potatoes were a couple of generous scoops of the Old Fashioned Chili Sauce. This is a low fat alternative to butter, yogurt or sour cream and it has a lot of flavour! As long as I can remember chili sauce is always served with potatoes because it just pairs so nicely with potatoes whether baked, steamed or mashed. It really is a comfort food pairing on a cold, blustery Canadian winter evening!