Nature’s Most Perfect Food

I usually think it’s bacon, but today it’s ham!

I cut down the salt-cured ham I’d had hanging since December last year. This is a fresh ham I’d rubbed with salt and spices and hung in our garage (yes, at ambient temperature) in December and just cut down today. I wrote about this in more detail a few years ago here.

Here’s this year’s ham:

Look at that ham! Look at that perfect ruby color! That shows that the cure has penetrated all through the meat.

I’d sliced off the end in the picture above to prepare for slicing off translucent slices to eat like prosciutto. What to do with the end piece?

Fry it up in a skillet with hominy, of course! This is how we ate it at home when I was growing up. Eating it raw in paper thin slices? I was an old man before I figured out that the prosciutto that I was paying so much for was the same thing as the home cured ham that Dad made.

Well, nonetheless home cured ham and hominy is a rare treat.

The hominy soaks up the ham flavor in the skillet and it’s most amazing salty rich dish you can imagine. I roasted a bit of kale so I’d have some greens and not feel so guilty about what I was eating.

Feel guilty? Naw. To only slightly paraphrase the song, “If eating home cured ham and hominy is wrong, I don’t wanna be right.”