Day 7 Judy O’Grady’s Ham
Now we come to a situation, the leftovers. What do you do if you have leftovers? Well, Peg Bracken answers this question, don’t plan for leftovers. Apparently, one of the ideas in the past now gaining popularity again is that of planning for leftovers. There is very little reason to do this unless you want to package all of those leftovers into a TV dinner for those rare times you do not have time to cook, you really do not want to cook, or (in my case) the oven caught on fire. No kidding, cooking a Turkey I somehow managed to catch the oven on fire and we had to finish the meal up on the grill. Now, there are only so many foods that are good the first time around. Some age beautifully and are better the next day. But there are many that do not fare well the first time around and do not deserve a second chance. Liver comes to mind, with canned peas a close second for me. Personally, I have also discovered that 1) you have to buy more storage items 2) you have to find rooms for storage of the washed and cleaned storage containers 3) If the item is plastic it will retain the icky smell of what was forgotten because no one wanted to eat the leftovers anyway. 4) no matter what you do, if kids didn’t eat it the first time, it's a safe bet that they won't the second time. And so it suffers a slow painful demise in the back of the refrigerator until you remember the thing and have to throw it out. Some people complain about the waste of food, but the truth of the matter it is still wasted if it is left to grow a colony of its own. Sometimes I wonder if I should try to convince the IRS that the leftover in my fridge is a dependent. They don’t buy it. So why waste a perfectly good fridge or freezer to store leftovers?
A word here: my grandmother was pretty amazing when it came to reusing leftovers of a lot of meals. She would look at us sternly and warn us that if we didn’t eat all of our vegetables they would be in the pancakes tomorrow. Vegetables in our pancakes, surely she was joking. There we were sitting in the back room NOT eating our corn. She wouldn’t really put corn in the pancakes. Mom said she most assuredly will, but being young and thinking that since we are visiting she would not subject us to such a thing we did not finish all of the corn. There was still a bowl of it on the table. The next morning, sure enough, pancakes. But, more importantly, just as she promised there was corn in those pancakes. It wasn’t too bad, but it wasn’t fantastic either. The next night she served peas. We ate our veggies. I do not know if peas could go into pancakes, but I wasn’t about to find out, same goes for spinach. Ham pieces might have been good though, but the vegetables, I do not think so. I don’t know about you but the whole idea that anyone would even dream of ruining a perfectly good pancake by adding peas terrifies me.
If you do decide you want to keep leftovers the best storage devices are, in my opinion, canning jars and empty jars with their lids. They are cheap to replace, you can see what is in there AND if you forget and it takes to growing fur the smell doesn’t seep into the plastic. It is also easier to store the jars, and if you lose the lid a wide mouth jar can be used for drinking some iced tea in the summer.
Now, I do want to say that once per week, I am lucky enough to have my husband make Sunday dinners. This week started with one of those Sundays. We had this huge ham that we had purchased on sale and stored in the freezer. My darling cooked that up for a fantastic dinner and there were a lot of leftovers. One of my sons set about cutting up the leftovers, some for the dinner on Monday, some for the ham spread sandwiches the next day, and some sliced up in the freezer.
While Peg Bracken says do not plan for leftovers, she recognizes that we are human and prone to ignore her sage advice, and so she graciously has a section in her cookbook for what to do with the leftovers. With the leftover ham, for example, I set about creating:
Judy O’Grady’s Ham**
Ingredients 6 servings
½ pound leftover ham
½ pound sharp Cheddar
1 teaspoon horseradish
½ teaspoon salt
1 can condensed cream of mushroom, celery, chicken soup
¼ cup milk
1 green pepper
2 cups of noodles
Directions.
Well, you’ll want to cook up the noodles until they are tender. It’s important to keep an eye on them as gluey noodles cannot be used for anything worthwhile and there would be no point continuing on. Now with the cheese, ham, green pepper, you’ll grind those up and then add the horseradish, salt, soup that you thinned with the milk. Pour this over the noodles that you placed in a casserole dish and mix it all up at 350F for forty minutes, oh and don’t forget to butter the casserole dish to prevent the noodles from sticking. A good reminder that most casserole meals need some type of greasing to prevent sticking. Now take some bread crumbs and sprinkle over the top add a little butter dotting it over the top and brown uncovered in the broiler.
Even if you don’t have leftovers, this is a good plan for ham all around. You can even skip the grinding part if you want. I did. I chopped everything and then got distracted somehow and forgot to grind everything up. It still ended up good and there were questions of seconds so there were no leftovers of this dish.
Stay tuned for the next installment of Misadventures in Cooking when we follow the passage of recipe and ask ourselves “what’s next?” “What about those peas in the can? Can they be salvaged?” “Can our heroine make it through the week without losing her mind?” All this and more to follow. Until next time have fun and stay Flamboyant my Flamingo friends.
**Bracken, P. (1960). The I hate to cook book. (pg. 36). New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
