Greetings all and happy Sunday!

Last week was the annual right family Spring gathering – non Saint Patrick’s Day edition – and it was flat out fucking amazing.

Can’t wait for the next gathering.

While there are indeed a few family members who are involved with their church, there are just as many who don’t do that church thing at all. Yours truly obviously. So I don’t know if we really should call this Easter dinner.

Let’s call it the Spring Ham Festival or some goddamn thing.

Sure.

While I linked to last years post on last week’s Sunday Gravy I’ll do it again here if you want to follow along.

“But yeah right” you may be saying, “That looks an awful lot like last year’s meal. The shit is that? You gonna just repost?”

I wouldn’t fuck around you good folks like that! Well, two of the items are basically flat-fucking-out exactly like last year. The ham and the mac and cheese but I’ve got two new recipes for you! Really! And if you read last year’s Easter Sunday Gravy then you may remember me waxing reminiscently about my grandmother MeMe’s homemade rolls. Well guess the fuck what?

Shit yes I did!

It was somewhere in the middle of all of this dinner prep when it dawned on me; holy shit I AM my grandmother now! When did that fucking happen? I mean, think about it. I cook everything from scratch and I host all of the family gatherings.

Motherfucker.

I guess it was by design. I’ve been making some of my grandmother(s) – plural – recipes for decades so it only makes sense as “The Keeper of the Family Food Flame” that it would come to this.

Actually I’m totally fucking cool with this as long as my grand kids call me “Grandaddy” instead of “Grandmommie.”

Yes, they all call me “Grandaddy.”

I worked alongside both eldest right and youngest right in the kitchen making this meal, which is fucking great because they help but I am also passing along the family recipes as I go. Once I get to the rocking chair age one or both of them will carry tradition on.

As it very well fucking should be!

Before getting to the recipes I’ve got a photo to show you.

Eldest right asked if there was something she could bring and since I was making the ham, mac and cheese and the two new recipes, I couldn’t really think of what else we needed so I told her to bring dessert and maybe some snacks.

This is what she considers “snacks”.

Enlarge that photo.

God. Damn!

Eldest right has officially earned the “Overachiever of the Week” award. She said “Well, you said to bring snacks.”

Amazing.

Let’s get going on this.

You all remember the ham process. Score one of these damn things.

There’s our old friend Farmer John again. I want to point out that this is a basic, smoked, fully cooked half ham. Grocery stores are trying more and more to turn ham sales into that “Honey Baked” spiral shit by pre-slicing the ham and including a packet of brown sugar crap that tries to replicate the hams you would get at a “Honey Baked Ham” store.

Don’t do that.

You don’t need to dump a big wad of sugar on your goddamn ham. Stop it. We’re fat enough as it fucking is.

Besides we will be getting all of the sweetness we need from pineapple juice.

Here’s the glaze for the ham.

1 16 ounce can of sliced pineapple. Reserve the slices and use 1 cup of the pineapple juice.

1 tablespoon of dijon mustard

1 tablespoon of honey.

3-4 shots of bourbon.

Put the pineapple juice in a bowl, then add in the honey, the mustard and bourbon. I used the good shit here.

That photo is from last year. There were two differences to that photo this year. First I used Bulleit bourbon rather than Buffalo Trace since it’s what I had on hand and second we didn’t need no stinking bag of store bought rolls this year!

Anyway preheat the oven to 350, glaze the ham, do the cross-hatch cut to the ham. Stick in the cloves. Impale some pineapple slices and cook for an hour and a half.

Resulting in?

As my Texas cousins would say “Hay-um.”

The mac and cheese recipe is the same as the linked one up there but this year I added a couple of shakes of some Red Rooster hot sauce to the cheese sauce and about a teaspoon of dry ground mustard.

Here we are pre-bake.

And here we go after 30 minutes of baking in the same 350 degree oven.

This year the cheeses included English Cheddar, American “Flagship” cheddar, gouda, mozzarella and some grated pecorino romano.

It was fucking delicious.

Let’s go ahead and get you to the new shit. We’ll start with the homemade rolls.

Rolls!

3/4 cup of 95-100 degree water – use a thermometer so we don’t kill the wee little yeasties

1 package of dry active yeast

1/4 cup of sugar

1 teaspoon of salt

3 1/2 cups of all purpose flour

1 beaten egg

2 tablespoons of room temperature butter plus 2 more tablespoons of melted butter for basting.

If you harken back to the time when we built the better burger you may recognize this as very similar to our homemade burger buns and you would be right. I simplified a step or two but that was indeed the consistency I was shooting for.

Put the yeast, sugar and warm water into the working bowl of your stand mixer and let sit for 10 minutes. This will activate and feed the yeast.

Then? Dump everything else into the bowl.

Put the hook attachment on the mixer, set a timer for 10 minutes and Walk. The. Fuck. Away.

That’s a good damn dough right there.

Remove the dough from the mixing bowl and form into a ball using your hands. Lightly oil the inside of a large bowl and roll the dough around until all sides are greased.

Cover with a kitchen towel and let rise in a warm place until doubled in size. Between 90 minutes to 2 hours. I had the oven going so it proofed just fine.

When the dough has risen – there’s a Christ joke in there somewhere – move to a lightly floured surface, punch down and cut the dough into 16 pieces. For symmetry sake I cut the dough in half, then each half was cut in half and so on until we had 16 pieces. Roll each piece into a ball and you know what happens next.

Yep. Let ’em rise for another hour.

After the final proof, cut a little cross into the tops of the dough then brush the tops of the rolls with half of the reserved melted butter. These will go in a 375 degree oven for 15 minutes and they will look like this when they are done.

Then baste with the remaining butter after they have baked.

I’m sure my grandmother cut the cross into the top of the rolls for Jesus, she was very religious, but I took a different approach.

Fresh rolls for Satan!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2OjbS_GnS4

I hope everyone has had a chance to walk into a house or a kitchen when fresh rolls or bread are cooking because motherfucker it smells incredible.

The other new recipe?

I’m glad you asked.

Cream Corn!

recipe taken from Allrecipes.com

Here are the ingredients used.

(2) 10 oz bags of frozen corn

1 cup of heavy cream

1 teaspoon of salt

2 tablespoons of sugar

some fresh ground black pepper

2 tablespoons of butter

1 cup of whole milk

2 tablespoons of flour

1/4 cup of freshly grated pecorino romano cheese

1/2 teaspoon of thyme

Here’s a fun thing: I didn’t personally make this! I gave the recipe I wanted to use to eldest granddaughter who did it all by herself!

Hell yes!

I figured she could help contribute much like she does for Saint Patrick’s Day with the soda bread. She was very happy to pitch in.

Important observation: thirteen year olds have a different sense of cooking cleanliness than you.

In a pot add the corn, cream, salt, sugar, pepper, thyme and butter and get cooking over a medium heat. Mix together the milk and the flour and add to the pan. Stir for several minutes to get everything combined and thickened.

Get it all bubbly and shit.

When it gets to a nice thick consistency we will add in the grated cheese.

Look at that!

Trust me this ain’t like that canned shit. At all. It goes fucking famously with all things pork and there’s a good chance it will get repeat play in the future.

Eldest granddaughter did an amazing job on this. I’ll handle the clean up. It’s cool.

To give you the cooking order/process, I started the dough first and let it do it’s two hour initial rise. Then ham goes in the oven. Cut and shape the rolls and let them get their last hour rise. After the ham was in the oven for an hour in goes the mac and cheese and both will be finished when another 30 minutes have elapsed, they both need to rest for a bit anyway so this gives us time to cook the rest of our shit.

Increase the oven temp to 375 and in go the rolls for their 15 minutes at the tanning salon. While the rolls are cooking, assemble and cook the cream corn. Rolls and corn are done at the same time. The ham and mac and cheese are both rested and cooled off and EVERY FUCKING THING is ready at the same time.

Boom!

I thought a timeline idea would make the whole process a little less intimidating and besides, the timing of everything while making this meal was balls-fucking-on perfect.

Just look at this.

The wine pairing was a Joel Gott sauvignon blanc.

There’s a reason why we make basically the same meal every year. Because it’s GODDAMN DELICIOUS THAT’S WHY!

Salty, savory ham with that insane bourbon mustard glaze, the intensely cheesy and decadent macaroni and cheese, the new edition of the rich, creamy and hearty cream corn and those rolls. Those goddamn motherfucking rolls.

You WILL be seeing the rolls again. A lot. Mostly to show you how easy they are to make provided you factor in the time to rise. There go the Jesus jokes again. I really want to show how easy it is to make homemade rolls and encourage everyone to give them a try. MeMe would be so fucking proud.

Maybe not with all of the cussing but that’s my shtick not hers.

There you go. Just in time for next fucking year.

Each one of these items is top fucking shelf and when you add them together your Springtime ham festival will be legendary.

Legendary I tells ya!

Thanks for reading along everyone.

You know I appreciate it.

Have yourself a good rest of a Sunday.

See you next time.

PEACE!