Ham and Beans

On these cold wintery days, I like to have a pot of soup or beans cooking during the day. It seems to somehow make the house cozier. A few weeks back, there was a good sale on bone-in hams.

We were not raised eating pork, and the very first time I ever encountered this better-than-turkey, Southern Thanksgiving Fare, was in Amarillo, Texas, during the warmest Thanksgiving I ever remember celebrating. I arrived from California, with my suitcase full of corduroy pants, turtleneck tees, and sweaters, only to encounter 75 degrees and a houseful of Southern Cooks baking every sort of delectable dish ever to be stuck in an oven...for 24 hours straight...and with no air conditioning!! My hair was dripping wet and frizzing for three days straight! But I ate. Boy did I eat!

I remember waking up early on Thanksgiving morning to a heady, smoky, meaty smell, and wandering into the kitchen in my sweats, asking WHAT that wonderful aroma was?? And for the first time, I was introduced to the wonderful thing that is a slow-cooked, bone-in, smoked ham. "Here, try a bit", I was offered...and I have never looked back.

So, as I was saying before my memories took over, I got a nice bone-in ham and put it in a metal baking dish and followed the baking chart directions. A few hours later, I pulled out this lovely, fall-off-the-bone ham. After letting it cool until I could handle it, I separated the chunks off the bone and set them on a plate to slice for supper and for sandwiches and breakfasts. I transferred the bones and the lovely juice and fat in the bottom of the pan, into my Grandma's old Dutch Oven Pot. I added 2 cups of dried white navy beans, 2 cans of chicken broth, a few whole allspice, some whole peppercorns, and 3-4 bay leaf. I put the cover on the pot and stuck in the oven at 250 degrees.

After a couple of hours, I pulled the pot out. The beans had soaked up all the liquid, so I added water to cover everything (including the ham bone) and returned the pot to the oven to cook for another 8 hours.

The house smelled fantastic!

I pulled the beans from the oven and removed the bones from the soup. In a frying pan, I sautéed an entire onion and 3 sticks of celery, chopped, in a little butter. While they were cooking, I chopped up 4 carrots. After adding all that to the pot, I brought everything to a simmer on a top burner and let it cook for about an hour.

Hams are inherently salty, so I did not add any at all, and this was a perfect saltiness.

With a couple of pieces of cornbread, we had

an amazing dinner, and enough for another

meal or two! Yumm!

Peacock Bowl

I was introduced to ceramics about 3 years

ago and, although I am not particularly great at painting, I do enjoy making something once in awhile. Before Christmas, I saw an advertisement for what the shop owner called a Peacock Bowl. I have been wanting for some time to make a couple for my granddaughters, so I signed up for a class last month.

Stephanie, our instructor, assured us that this was something that would be pretty hard for us to mess up. LOL...

First, we painted the entire bowl with a couple of layers of white base coat. Then, we painted the design with several different colors. While that was drying, we

painted the back side of the bowl with three coats of black paint.

To finish it, we painted two coats of a gray, grainy paint and left the bowls to dry. The following week, Stephanie fired them. The special paints and gray coating blended together and THIS is what came out!!

A beautiful Peacock Bowl!

Valentine's Cookies

It's always fun to make a batch of Valentine's Day cookies! This year, I decided to up my game and try a new frosting. Until now, I have always frosted my cookies with a plain icing of powdered sugar, water, lemon extract and food coloring. But I have been reading quite a lot about Royal Icing and decided to make it instead. I know I am always showing you the cool things I do and make, but, since I am no Spring Chicken, there are very few things that I do where I can take you along on the journey from New Idea to Using New Idea to Discovering what I Do Not Like About the New Idea to Perfecting the New Idea...

Royal Icing

3 Egg Whites at room temperature, beaten until frothy

One 16 ounce bag of Powdered Sugar

Red Food Color & Vanilla Extract

Slowly incorporate the powdered sugar into the egg whites. Add a little vanilla and mix well. Working quickly (this frosting dries out FAST) spoon about 1/3 of the white frosting into a pastry bag, tube or baggie. Then add enough red food coloring to the remaining frosting to make it a sort pink. Spoon half of this mixture into another pastry bag, tube, or baggie. Now add lots more red food coloring to get the dark color you want and put this into a final pastry bag, tube, or baggie.

What I liked about this frosting:

1. It was really easy to attach the different kinds of sprinkles I used to decorate with.

2. The frosting dried quickly and made it nice and easy to pack the cookies for traveling.

What I didn't like about this frosting:

1. Following the recipe, the frosting is very thick and difficult to apply with a pastry nozzle. This caused the nozzle to plug easily and the frosting to clump. The recipe did not give an option for thinning the frosting down; I wasn't sure if adding water would ruin or change

2. The frosting did not smooth out when spread, like icing does. It stayed kind of texture-y.

3. I found I was a little uncomfortable with using the raw egg, even though all the Royal Frosting recipes I found called for it. I think that in the end, I will just start a week before (like I always have), use regular icing, and give the cookies enough time to dry well before shipping.