While last weeks never ending migraine kept me from thinking straight it didn’t keep me from cooking. Before I started eating “real food” coming up with something fast would have been no problem. There was always something premade that could be quickly made such as Hamburger Helper, chicken nuggets, fish sticks, pizza, etc. Now cooking is still easy but sometimes takes a bit of planning.

By the end of headache day 1, when it looked like it may drag on, I pulled a ham out of the freezer. I then committed a cooking no no by leaving it on the counter for about 2 hours so it could start to thaw. Yes, I know your suppose to thaw items in the refrigerator and I suggest that you do. But I didn’t and we all lived to tell the tale   After the wrapped ham sat on the counter for a bit I put it in the refrigerator until the morning. 

Cooking a partially thawed ham (a ham shank not the spiral cut kind you get for the holidays)  in the crockpot takes a bit more time. So I put the ham cooking on low when I first got up around 8 am. I added about 3/4 cup of water to the bottom of the crock.  After about 4 hours of cooking I carefully turned the ham over. I don’t know if it was necessary but since it wasn’t completely thawed when I put it in I figured it couldn’t hurt. By 5 pm the meat had started to pull away from the bone and the crock was filled with several cups of ham broth. If you have a thermometer you can check the temp of the ham to make sure it’s cooked all the way through. It should register about 150 to 160 F (so says my crockpot cookbook).

I took a picture of the finished ham. It looked fine at the time. Not beautiful like many of the other pictures found on food blogs but at least it looked like a ham. Well, I thought it looked like a ham until I uploaded it today. Then I realized that it was a blurry mess. So no ham picture. I didn’t even take a picture of what I actually did with the ham that night. My brain hurt too much.

We had breakfast for supper…..sliced ham, scrambled eggs and toasted wheat bread with assorted fruit for dessert. Nothing fancy but still delicious, REAL food.

I pulled the remaining meat off the ham and put it in the refrigerator. I also saved all the ham broth to be used in soup that I made the next day. As for the ham bone, it will make a return visit in the future when I make more soup. For now I put it into a labeled freezer bag (don’t forget to write the date) and stuck it in the freezer.

Here’s a few other things that you could quickly make with the leftover ham:

Ham, Kale and White Bean Soup

Ham and Potato Casserole

Ham with Red Eye Gravy and homemade biscuits

I’ll be posting these recipes soon. If the post does not include the link for them now it will be updated very soon.

Print PDF