House Butch
Life with Mrs. deWinter

Too Busy to blog is Too Busy!

It's been such a whirlwind I'm not even sure what I've done for fun in the last week! Lots of work, which is a good thing. Twisted my knee, which is a bad thing. Made a peanut-butter glazed ham which is an interesting thing. I don't think I'll ever make one again, and perhaps I should post the recipe here for herstorical purposes, but if I did I've have to add a Do Not Try This At Home warning!

Mrs. deWinter takes care of me in so many ways, and one of the ways I make this care-taking a mutual thing is by making her breakfast every work morning, along with a pot of coffee for her thermos. She loves having those little thermos-top cups of coffee throughout her work day, and she says my coffee is the best. Breakfast is usually a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on oatmeal bread. Peanut butter for protein, jelly for sweet, oatmeal for cholesterol control.

Mrs. deWinter buys natural peanut butter in a jar and loves it, and I don't mind stirring the oil into the peanut butter with each new jar, though I hate the inevitable blob of oil on the counter, on my tee-shirt, on my shorts or pants. They need to make those jars bigger, I swear, 'cause there's just not enough room to mix oil and peanut butter without minor household accidents. (Shout is a staple product around here.)

She must have been thinking about that very thing when she came home a few weeks ago with a self-ground variety from the co-op that didn't require the stirring. Isn't that sweet? Unfortunately, the first morning I opened it I discovered it was too hard to spread. Hmmm. When I reported the situation to Mrs. deWinter, she said "You'll think of something. And no, I don't want cashew butter instead." You know, I just don't understand this. I think cashew butter is scrumptious. She got a ham and cheese sandwich that morning, that evening she came home with a reliable jar of peanut butter, and I started thinking about what to do with the unspreadable variety.

When she brought home a half-ham the next time she went grocery shopping, a light went off in my head, and so was born the concept of the peanut-butter glazed ham. Intriguing. Novel. The best "something" I had thought of for that hard lump of peanut butter.

So, I looked through my considerable library of cookbooks and found nothing. That should have given me a clue, but I can be so stubborn when it comes to my creative ideas. Next, I went online to see if anyone had ever made a ham with peanut butter and found these recipes:

peanut butter ham loaf
(wouldn't work for me, required beef and too little ham)
ham salad with hot peanut dressing
(wouldn't work for me for several reasons, though it sounded interesting)
Mrs. Jenkins crunchy ham slice
(wouldn't work for me, I had a half-ham, not a ham steak)
ham with peanut butter gravy
(wouldn't work for me, I had a pre-cooked ham)
ham loaf
(wouldn't work for me, it required pork and beef and used too little peanut butter)

Hmmm. OK, I thought, I'm just going to create my own recipe. Now I did have fun, and Mrs. deWinter graciously ate her peanut-butter glazed ham with carrots and leeks, and she even had a second serving a couple of nights later. It's not that it was bad, it was just, well, too much peanut butter and just too weird, even for gals with a culinary sense of adventure. So we put the rest of the ham in a colander, rinsed off all the rest of the peanut butter glaze, sliced the ham into steaks and froze them for future meals. A very messy task.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Next fall I'm going to try the pumpkin-peanut butter soup recipe I came across.

And maybe I should consider taking up the practice of baking. Lots of tried-and-true recipes for peanut butter in baked goods. Hmmm....

Permabutchlink posted by House Butch -- 12:15 PM.

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