What are You Cooking the Week of May 24, 2020?

[BakerAunt]

It's the Memorial Day Weekend. What are your cooking plans?

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[Joan Simpson]

Sloppy Joe's here today.

[Mike Nolan]

I've got a sliced ham marinating in pineapple juice and I'll bake it for supper, it should go very well with the rye bread I made on Friday.

I'm also making a batch of potato salad, because it's Memorial Day Weekend.

[BakerAunt]

I made another batch of yogurt on Sunday, in between baking projects.

[Italiancook]

I baked an 8-1/2 lb. ham today. The first I'd ever done. I used a Food Network recipe, minus the glaze, and it turned out tasty. I erred in that the recipe said to fill the pan with 1/4" water, and I forgot that. Ham was on a rack, so there was quite the burned on mess under the ham to clean -- soak. There's plenty of leftover ham. I just haven't decided how to use it. I left a lot of ham on the bone and froze it. If I can find white beans at the grocery, I'll use it for bean soup.

[Mike Nolan]

Years ago we started marinating ham in Dr. Pepper. Everybody thought I was crazy until Alton Brown did it, too. My older son is a big Alton Brown fan, he's even attended his lectures/performances a few times. When he saw the episode on ham marinated in Dr. Pepper, he laughed so hard we could hear him all through the house.

It works especially well on sliced hams because it gets deep into the slices.

When we were living in Chicago back in the 70's the grocery deli counters had this gadget that would slice and restack a canned ham so carefully you had to look hard to see where the slices were. Those marinated very well, the spiral sliced ones do, too.

Recently I've been using pineapple juice because diet Dr. Pepper is all we have in the house and it doesn't work as well on ham. I've done one in ginger ale, too, and it was quite good.

[Joan Simpson]

I've eaten ham baked with Dr.Pepper and my cousin baked one that was with coke,both very good.

[RiversideLen]

I made ground chicken cooked with onion, sweet red pepper and diced carrots, seasoned with a good pinch of celery seed. I added a can of cream of chicken soup with about a half can of water to make a gravy for it. It came out pretty good.

[BakerAunt]

Italian Cook--I've been using parchment paper under the racks when we roast chicken pieces. It protects the pan and makes clean-up a snap. That only works if one is throwing away the juices (fat in the case of the chicken). With a whole chicken, turkey, or ham, I would want the drippings.

[Italiancook]

In this case, I wanted the fat from the pan. The drippings burned up, because I hadn't followed instructions to put 1/4" water in the pan. But I did harvest the fat and the drippings from the platter where the ham rested. I'll use them to make ham gravy to go with mashed potato and ham lunch tomorrow. I wouldn't have thought of putting parchment in the bottom of the pan, BakerAunt. I appreciate the tip and will do that when the occasion arises.

Mike, a friend told me about giner ale, but I didn't do that. I thought it'd make the pan drippings (if they hadn't burned) and fat too sweet for gravy. She said she pours the giner ale over the ham. Is that what you do? I can't imagine how you marinate a ham -- It's so large. What's big enough to hold the ham to cover it with Dr. Pepper for marinating?

[Mike Nolan]

Well, this wasn't a big ham, this was a sliced boneless ham, maybe 3 pounds. I put it in a 1 gallon ziplock bag and added the marinade, rotating and shaking it a couple times over the next few hours.

They make 2 gallon ziplock bags that would work for a bone-in ham. You have to look around for them, most grocery stores don't carry them. I have a large box of them that I think I got at a Gordon Food Services. Turkey roaster bags work well, too, but are pricey.

We got started on the Dr. Pepper hams after my grandfather died. He ran a small-town drug store (complete with soda fountain) for over 50 years and there was about a half gallon of Dr. Pepper fountain syrup left when he closed his store. It was something you could brush on like barbecue sauce. After it ran out, we started using Dr. Pepper in 2 quart bottles, I think the carbonation actually helps it soak in.

[RiversideLen]

Hefty makes a 2 1/2 gallon slider storage bag. I always keep some of them on hand because often the gallon bag just isn't large enough. If you can't find them locally, Amazon has them.

[S_Wirth]

This link has Hefty 2.5 gallon and the Ziplock 2 gallon bags.

https://www.walmart.com/search/?cat_id=0&query=2+gallon+ziplock+bags

I use the 2 gallon bags to take 9 x 13 cakes somewhere.

[Mike Nolan]

We have sandwich bags, quart bags, half-gallon bags, gallon bags, two gallon bags and some sheet pan sized bags (they'll hold a full 26x18 sheet pan, but they aren't ziplock bags.)

Quart ones seem to be the ones we use most.

[Mike Nolan]

I've been working on my celery and carrot vinegars, and I now have some in refrigerator-size bottles with some custom labels done using my laser printer. I've used the celery vinegar for some egg salad and for the potato salad I made yesterday, I haven't used the carrot vinegar for anything yet, I think it'd be interesting in a stir fry, where I sometimes use a rice wine vinegar.

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