Baked Ham
Yup, ham. A big pile of ham. Nothing special here, but it’s a family favorite and the left-overs alone make for great soups and omelets. Incredibly simple recipe, great flavor. We serve it about four times a year. Everyone wants a piece that was near one of the cloves. Ingredients 1 Butt portion, fully cooked/smoked ham. Normal fare at a grocery store. Shoulder is OK. 1/4 cup honey (orange blossom is our favorite) 2 Tbs mustard 3 Tbs brown sugar Whole cloves Directions We cut off the skin and fat from the top of the ham, and then slice the open face and the top of the butt (the part you just cut the fat and skin from) with a diamond deep cut, about 1 1/5 inch grid. Then poke a clove into the center of each of the diamond cuts. Mix the honey, mustard and...
Enchiladas
We began making enchiladas after moving to Virginia from Arizona (1992). We couldn’t find a single good mexican restaurant in the D.C. area, so we began cooking our own fare. You can use any kind of meat. We often will grill some chicken breasts, but we’ve used chicken leg quarters as well. One of our favorite batches was using some turkey we had smoked. You can use any kind of cheese, too, but we’ve found just using ‘cheddar’ is too heavy. You can use store-bought enchilada sauce as well, but home-made is very easy and tastes much better. This batch makes a lot, so half it if you’re only feeding a couple people, or you’ll be eating enchiladas all week. Enchilada sauce. 2 cups chicken broth 4 Tbs Chili Powder 1 tsp....
Pizza!
We’ve been making home-made pizza since the girls found out what pizza was. Tomorrow night I’ll be cooking a couple home-made pizzas for Savannah’s birthday. This is following YEARS of tradition of making pizzas for sleepovers and almost always a gaggle of girls for a birthday sleepover. Big difference is that this will be Savannah’s last pizza sleepover, as she turned 18 a few days ago and will be heading off to college next fall. Good news is that we still have Ginny for at least two more runs! This is better than any delivered pizza we’ve had. And we’ve picked up that phone a lot. Granted, it’s a lot more work, but for sleep-overs, the key is that the kids make their own pizzas (we do the sauce and the dough, they do...
Don’s famous chili
This may be the last cold weekend we get till next fall, and since it is Super Bowl weekend, we thought we’d start it off with Don’s Chili. This is a home-made recipe based off of years of horsing around. To REALLY make it great, toss in some diced chipotle peppers and it’s adobo sauce. We usually make a small pot on the side of that patch, since Don’s the only one who can eat it. Ingredients 2 TB of olive oil 1 Sweet onion, chopped. We like big onion pieces for the flavor. 2 Heaping TB of minced garlic (we buy ours by the big jar) 1 LB Ground chicken 1 tsp Fresh ground pepper, we use the McCormick peppercorn medley 2 1LB cans of crushed tomatoes 3 14oz cans of roasted, diced tomatoes 2 14oz cans of black beans 2 TB of chili powder 1 tsp...
End of the year BBQ Sauce
For almost ten years Don has cooked up a batch of home-made BBQ sauce on the last school day of the year. The first year was the spring of 1999, we had moved to a new house in Georgia in the fall of 1998, and Don wanted to start making some new traditions of our own. Thus, the “end of the year BBQ sauce” tradition began. Tomorrow is the last day of school, and since he’ll be busy making the sauce in the afternoon, we’ll post the recipe for anyone who wants to join in and make their own. It’s a vinegar-based sauce that has a real nice peppery kick to it. We smoked a chicken, chops and a roast last weekend, all part of the plan. Tomorrow night we’ll enjoy some of it with the sauce. One of our favorite traditions, however, is to...