Why Iberian ham deserves a place on the British dining table

How much do you know about Iberian ham? I have to admit I was a little hazy - I knew it from restaurants and deli counters as a wafer thin type of cured ham from Spain but that was about it.

In fact it's the pigs that are Iberian. They have dark skin and look black rather than pink, with long slender hind legs. They live in freedom and graze on acorns in certain parts of Spain, which apparently gives the meat a unique taste.

It's quite interesting reading about the process to produce the ham from salting to washing, then the pieces are left for up to three month for the salt to permeate. The really unique bit is the way the hams are cured - hung up and exposed to the natural climate conditions for 18-24 months and after that aged in a cellar for at least another 12 months (usually 18). The secret of curing is passed down in families from generation to generation.

It's also part of the famed Mediterranean diet - Iberian ham is high in monounsaturated fatty acids, protein, zinc and vitamins B1, B3 and B12, according to the information leaflet I received.

I was sent some Iberian ham by Ibeham, a project promoted by the Denomination of Origin Guijuelo (Spain). There are plenty of recipes on their site suggesting how to enjoy the ham but I wanted something fairly pure and simple, so tried it on a piece of fresh bread with some mozzarella and a little olive oil.

The slices are so wafer thin they are almost transparent, separated in the packet by pieces of plastic so you can peel the ham off. Each slice has a ribbon of fat which dissolved on the tongue and the taste and texture were both top notch. There are a lot of recipes you can use this in but I just want to savour the flavour by itself!

If you can get hold of some proper Iberian ham - and you don't have to go to specialist shops, Waitrose has some - then I highly recommend it as a little bit of luxury if you're just having a sandwich, or a platter for guests if you are entertaining.

Thanks to Ibeham for the ham to review

 

Cheesy Ham and Hash Brown Casserole

This is something a bit different for breakfast or brunch - a cheesy ham and hash brown casserole. I think it would work well as a side dish as part of a larger breakfast - if you were cooking for a crowd for instance. We had it on its own and my husband said it needed something like sausage or bacon with it, and as it is quite rich and calorific, I think perhaps a couple of spoonfuls with some fried eggs or similar would be better. Either way it did taste really good!

Today is Valentine's day and you could even make it if you are cooking your loved one a special breakfast. I had planned to post a Valentine's cake today but due to unforeseen circumstances have been unable to make it!

You can find the recipe here at AllRecipes.com. It's an American recipe and I have a feeling that when it lists frozen hash browns in the ingredients, it means shredded potato rather than the triangular wedges you get in the frozen food department of UK supermarkets. I've eaten that sort of hash brown before in America and it makes more sense when the recipe instructs you to mix them in a bowl, I don't imagine it means the solid triangular ones.

However that was all I had and it worked fine, if a little difficult to mix initially - but when it was baked it was perfect! I used tinned ham but you could use leftover from a roast, or add chunks of sausage or diced bacon. I couldn't get cream of potato soup so used leek and potato soup (and to be honest, I felt the recipe was crying out for some green veg! My husband doesn't like leek, otherwise I would have added sliced fresh leek). I also left the parmesan cheese off the top as I decided it was cheesy enough!

So this is what I did:
To serve 6-8 as a side dish or 3-4 as a main dish:

600-700g frozen hash browns
300g tinned ham, diced into large chunks
400g tin of leek and potato soup
150ml sour cream
250g cheddar, grated
splash of milk

 

Preheat oven to 190C. Put the frozen hash browns in a large oven proof dish. In a separate bowl or jug, mix together the soup, cream and ham. Add the grated cheddar and a splash of milk so you have a thick liquid that you can pour over the hash browns.

Pour the mixture into the ovenproof dish and carefully turn the hash browns until they are all coated and covered by the mixture. Bake in the oven for an hour.

Serve with sausages or bacon or fried eggs or as a side dish to a larger buffet brunch.

 

I'm sharing this with the Weekend brunch club linkup hosted by Gingey Bites

 

Mini Chicken and Ham Picnic Pasties

Copyright Caroline Makes dot Net

These mini pasties are a good way to use up leftover cooked chicken, are easy to make (especially if you use shop-bought pastry) and are a nice alternative to sandwiches to take on a picnic or in your lunchbox.

I had some shortcrust pastry in the freezer, and these pie moulds from Lakeland I bought ages ago in the sale and had never gotten around to using.

You get three different size moulds in the box:

I cooked some chicken (you could also use ready cooked) and mixed it with some chopped ham from a tin, a handful of fresh parsley and a little crème fraiche (I would have added onion but my husband doesn't really like it). You can also add peas, mushroom or sweetcorn (cooked) if you like.

Rolling out the pastry, I decided to open out the pie mould and cut around it to get circles of the right size.

I placed the circle inside the mould, put filling in one half and squeezed it shut - this makes it so easy to get the lovely fluted edge you see on Cornish pasties.

I glazed them with milk and baked them in the oven at 180C for about 20-25 mins.

 

Let me know if you try different variants on the filling!

I'm sharing these with Cook Once, Eat Twice, hosted by Corina at Searching for Spice.

Crumpet Pizzas

 

I really thought I had blogged about these before as I've made them several times, but can't find any mention on my blog so I'm sharing the idea with you now. It's more of an idea than a recipe; a quick and easy weekend lunch and something that I imagine might be fun to make with children. I usually use normal-sized crumpets but have also tried with Warburton's giant crumpets which work brilliantly!

Lightly toast your crumpets under the grill and spread each one with about 1/2 tsp tomato puree. Top with cheese - either grated or thinly sliced, or a processed cheese slice (eg Kraft). Other toppings are optional - here, I did some with ham and pineapple. Return to the grill until the cheese is bubbling and enjoy!

Slow Cooker Ham and Potato Soup

Just before Christmas I made slow cooker ham in Cherry Coke which was delicious. I deliberately cooked too much ham so I would have some left for another recipe the next day; if you have leftover ham from Christmas this is a great way to use it up (and any leftover potato and veg you have as well).

 

The quantities are easily adjusted depending on how much leftovers you have to use and how many people you are serving so my recipe is more of a rough guide.

I used:
2 cups leftover cooked ham, chopped
1 pork stock cube (you could also use chicken or vegetable)
1 onion, chopped
1 carrot, chopped (I used a raw carrot but you could use leftover cooked veg)
1 cup leftover mashed potato, cooked (you could also use leftover boiled or roast potatoes, or raw potatoes cut into small cubes)
1 cup milk
1/2 cup sour cream (you could also use leftover single or double cream)

Place all the ingredients in your slow cooker apart from the milk and cream, and add enough water to cover the veg.

Cook on high for 3 hours or medium for 5-6 hours.

When ready, take about half the soup out of the slow cooker and blend until smooth in a food processor.

 Return to the soup and mix in so it still has some chunks of meat and veg. Add the milk and cream and serve. You can add more water if you want the soup to be thinner but I liked it as it was.

I'm sharing this with the Slow Cooker Challenge, hosted by Lucy aka Baking Queen 74 as the theme is Christmas.

I'm also sending this to the No Waste Food Challenge hosted by Jen's Food as this recipe uses all sorts of leftovers.

Slow Cooker Ham in Cherry Coke

I've made a ham in Coca-Cola in the slow cooker before and thought it would be a good dinner in the week before Christmas - quite festive and also easy as you just put it in the slow cooker and forget about it.

 

I only had Coca-Cola though but I figured that would work - but this time rather than adding cloves, onion, carrots and bay leaves to the cola 'stock' I decided to just do it straight, in nothing but the cola, but then make a glaze from brown sugar and honey at the end.

So essentially that's all I did - I used two small gammon joints as I wanted this to do a second meal as well - I made ham soup the following day which was really good (recipe to follow!) and covered them in Cherry Coke. I put the slow cooker on high for 3-4 hours and when the joints were cooked, I removed them from the stock and put them in a roasting pan.

I mixed brown sugar with honey which I spread over the ham and then baked it in a hot oven for 20 minutes. I served it with a mixture of mashed and boiled potatoes and vegetables - the ham was very good and had a slightly sweet flavour from the stock and the glaze, and fell apart at the touch of a fork, in texture a lot like pulled pork.

I know for a lot of families it's traditional to have a ham at Christmas either alongside the turkey or to serve cold on Boxing Day so I highly recommend this recipe!

I'm sending this to the Slow Cooker Challenge, hosted by Lucy aka Baking Queen 74, as the theme is Christmas.

 

 

I'm also sending this to Cook Once Eat Twice, hosted by Corina at Searching for Spice, as I made soup from this the following day.



Chicken and Ham Croquettes

 

 

One of my favourite novels when I was younger was Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel. It's probably still one of my favourites, but I don't read as much as when I was a teenager, and I don't really read "the classics" any more - I was a bit studious (and pretentious) as a teenager I think!

 

Look Homeward, Angel is a 1929 coming-of-age novel, and highly autobiographical. The book tells the story of Eugene Gant, a precocious, sensitive young boy born into a family of larger-than-life characters who run a boarding house in Altamont - a fictionalised version of Wolfe's own home town, Asheville in North Carolina.

 

The novel is written in a sprawling stream of consciousness style and the language is both very much of its time and reflective of Eugene's romanticism and pretention, with paragraphs like "Come up into the hills, O my young love. Return! O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again, as first I knew you in the timeless valley, where we shall feel ourselves anew, bedded on magic in the month of June."

 

The author and his mother (my photo of a framed picture in their house)

 

But that's to take it out of context of course, and when I first read this novel - I was au pair to a German-American woman who had studied at school and I borrowed it from her bookshelf - I was swept away by the beauty and somehow importance of the language and the ideas. The opening lines of the novel are particularly weighty and memorable:

 

“. . . a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.

Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.

Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?

O waste of lost, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this weary, unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.”

 

I'm sure I've lost some of you there so should probably reiterate that this really is an outstanding novel, the author's masterpiece and most famous work (admittedly he died young, but it is in the canon of great American literature).

 

My photo of the author's writing

 

Fast forward 15 or so years and I was planning a road trip to my boyfriend across four or five US states, starting in Baltimore (where I was going for work), travelling as far as we could in just under a week and looping back round to finish in Washington D.C. We knew that we had time to venture as far as North Carolina and I was researching what we might do there, and came across somewhere called the Biltmore Estate - the Vanderbilt property that is the largest house in America. It actually turned out to be similar to many stately homes I've visisted in England and not actually any bigger than a lot of them, but for America it is quite unique. Anyway, Biltmore is in a small town called Asheville, which rang absolutely no bells at all until I was reading up on other things to do there - and came across the Thomas Wolfe house. I almost fell off my chair (literally) when I realised this was the Altamont I had read of - it is portrayed in such accurate detail in the novel and was so true to the real Asheville that I knew we had to go there. And when I discovered we could visit "the most famous boarding house in American literature" (NY Times) there was really no question. I'm not suer my boyfriend particularly appreciated the hour-long tour of what is not a particularly big house as the guide made continued references to the author and the book, which he had not read! But I was very excited to know I was standing where Eugene Grant - and in fact Thomas Wolfe himself - had grown up and that this was the inspiration for the novel.

 

The boarding house in Asheville

 What has all this got to do with food, I hear you ask.... I often like to cook dishes inspired by fiction, whether it is books or films (the latter as I take part in the monthly Food 'n' Flix challenge). This month Chris at Cooking Around the World and Galina from Chez Maximka are hosting a new challenge, called Read, Cook, Eat - the idea being to make a dish based on any book. That's quite a wide brief, but after my trip to Asheville I knew I had to make something from Look Homeward, Angel.

 

The book is full of food - mainly family meals cooked and eaten in the boarding house, though there are also passages describing how the paying guests ate in the dining room while Eugene and his siblings were squeezed into the pantry. There are very evocative descriptions of food as Eugene absorbs everything around him and describes the food in as much detail as he describes everything else.

 
In the gift shop of the Thomas Wolfe Museum I was thrilled to find a recipe book called "Papa loved hot biscuits and corn bread - recipes from the Old Kentucky Home" (the name of the boarding house in the novel). It was put together by the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Advisory Committee and in the book was a recipe for croquettes, which I decided to make. I adapted the recipe a little, to leave out the mushrooms as we don't like them, and the celery salt as I didn't have any. I've also rewritten the recipe in my own words.

 

To serve two, you need:

Two chicken breasts, cooked, or equivalent amount of leftover cooked chicken

100g cooked ham

1/2 tsp salt

1 tsp chopped fresh parsley

1 egg 

about 50g plain flour

about 200g dried breadcrumbs

1 cup croquette sauce - see below.

 

For the croquette sauce:
4 tbsp butter

1/4 tsp salt

1/3 cup plain flour

1 cup milk or cream

First make the sauce. In a small pan melt the butter, add the flour and stir until blended. Gradually add milk, stirring continually. Bring to the boil and simmer for two minutes then remove from the heat and allow to cool.

To make the croquettes, place the chicken and ham in a food processor with the salt and the parsley and pulse until you have almost a pate. Then stir in the croquette sauce; if there is room in your food processor you can blend again.

 Shape the mixture into balls.

Crack an egg into a shallow dish and beat it and place the breadcrumbs in another.

Roll the croquette in flour then in beaten egg then roll in the breadcrumbs until coated. Repeat with each croquette.

Fry or oven bake until golden brown.

Only a couple of these per person are very filling. They are definitely better homemade than from the freezer cabinet too!

 I'm sending these to Chris at Cooking Around the World and Galina from Chez Maximka

 

National Spam Appreciation Week - Spam and Mushroom Filled Pancakes

Spam, spam, spammity spam - I'm not really a Monty Python fan and I wasn't sure I remembered ever having eaten Spam either, though according to my mother we had it a lot when I was a child!

March 3rd sees the start of National Spam Appreciation Week and it seemed a good time to reintroduce my tastebuds to the chopped pork and ham that is Spam. The name apparently comes from the description of spiced pork and ham. Did you know that it was invented during a meat crisis- but rather than when meat was scarce, it was when there was too much meat? There was an excess of pork which would not keep for long, and the head of Hormel Food Company in Minnesota had the idea of grinding up the pork, mixing it with ham and cooking it to create a long-life meat product. This was all the way back in 1937 and Spam has been around ever since. It is widely associated with war time when meat was more scarce - and also famous due to the Monty Python sketch and Spamalot musical.


I think people who turn their nose up at canned meat should also ask themselves whether they have ever eaten corned beef, as that's not much different  - and that was another staple of my childhood. I buy tinned ham occasionally as I think it works really well in pasta bakes, and I found that the Spam had a similar taste and texture.

I was sent three packs of Spam to try out - it's also interesting that it now comes in plastic tubs, so you don't need a tin opener - making it ideal to take on camping trips or picnics. I had a look at the Spam website where there are loads of recipes, and chose to make these Spam and Mushroom Filled Pancakes (or "Spamcakes"!). I made them for lunch with my parents and we all really enjoyed them. I made it slightly differently to the directions, as time was ticking on and I didn't want to wait the extra 20 minutes to cook the pancakes in the oven at the end, and so rather than sprinkle the cheese over the top I incorporated it into the sauce, which was delicious. I also doubled the quantity of the pancake mixture given, but I did make quite large, thick pancakes, so that part is up to you!

To serve three/four, you need:

For the pancakes:
200g plain flour
pinch of salt
3 eggs
500ml milk
Oil or Fry Light for frying

For the filling:
340g can of Spam chopped pork and ham, diced
1 small onion, finely chopped
115g mushrooms, sliced
50g butter
40g plain flour
300ml milk
100ml single cream
60g grated cheddar

I started on the filling first, as it took a little longer and the pancakes were quite quick,though I would also recommend making the pancake batter and allowing it to stand while you make the filling.

Fry the onion and mushrooms in a small frying pan. Meanwhile melt the butter in a small pan and stir in the flour to make a roux. Beat in a little of the milk and then gradually add the rest of the milk and the single cream. Stir in the grated cheddar and heat the sauce until melted then stir in the onion, mushrooms and diced Spam. Heat until the sauce has thickened.

For the pancakes, make a well in the flour in a bowl and break in the eggs; beat in a little of the milk to make a paste then the rest of the milk and the salt. Heat some oil or Fry Light in a frying pan, pour in a thin layer of pancake batter and cook on both sides until browned. Keep the pancakes warm either in the oven or under a layer of foil.

When the filling has thickened, spoon onto each pancake.

I rolled the pancakes but I think they would have looked nicer folded in half to make a semicircle. Either way, they tasted delicious!