What I should be doing is not always what I do.

 I should be doing so many things right now other than an admittedly boring food blogpost. I set out ingredients earlier to bake cookies but haven't started yet. Instead, I started changing things around in my kitchen and then my bedroom and then the dining area of our great room. 

And then I came to a stopping point, needing RH to come home and help me with some of the heavy stuff--a large picture to move from the dining area to my bedroom, the upper open shelf in the kitchen for him to clean and move things around on like I had done the lower shelf. There are things sitting on my counters, the dining table has hammer, nails, dust cloths and polish sitting on it and a few final Christmas things I took down and need to be stored, the laundry  basket sitting in a chair by the dining table waiting for the table to be cleared so I can fold white things, the vacumn pulled out on the floor for him to use it on the top of a large armoir, a stepladder waiting for him to climb. And now he's home and wants to wait until tomorrow for his honey-do list. 

So I'm sitting down to rest and wanting to change a blog post here at Across the Way that has not been changed since December 9, that's December 9. 

And everything I wanted to blog on requires this little thing or that little thing to finish up first. So I am going to dump on my poor few readers one of the many food posts that I never got around to posting. And it's a ham based menu at that, Ham, on readers who include vegetarians and people who probably never fix ham because they always blog such beautiful healthy meals. 

All I can say is, please, please, please don't feel as if you have to comment, not even my faithful few who still come here. You are totally excused! This is just for my own family because we love ham. Or at least some of us do. About every three months RH buys one at Costco and we have ham and vegetables, and ham and eggs for breakfast, and ham sandwiches, and the ham bone goes in the freezer for flavoring dried beans.

And then the last scraps of ham go into a ham and potato casserole. And it is delicious!

I don't have a written down recipe but I cook the potatoes first in a pot till tender and slice them and it has sliced onions and milk and cheese and pepper and whatnot in it.

I serve braised cabbage with it.

And this particular time I had cranberry sauce in the fridge.

And that small bowl to the left was Silver Palate's Pineapple Bake, a bread pudding that is so good with ham.

Here's a link I found to the recipe that shows how simple the recipe is.

And I might as well include the recipe from Food & Wine that I use for ham broth that I make from the ham bone to flavor dried beans. Maybe you can read it if you're interested.

It's kind of fun to make, just as is any stock. At least I always feel thrifty and housewifely when I make my own stock. 

Now if tomorrow I can finish up all those little projects I started today. Anyone else ever do that? Oh I forgot, you're not supposed to leave a comment on this one!

Fallen Into Disgrace

And take biscuits--biscuits had fallen into disgrace right along with cake. Would anybody eat a biscuit anymore? No way, not on your life. Too fattening! Too much cholesterol! All that white flour! All that shortening! On and on, 'til you could keel over and croak. She'd been born in the wrong century.

Jan Karon's Esther Bolick in

In This Mountain

I share your pain, Esther. I thought about you while I was basting my buttermilk biscuits with more buttermilk before popping them into the oven. 

I know you did finally keel over and croak, Esther, many books later, but I blame that on all those orange marmalade cakes you baked over the years, not the much maligned biscuit. 

After all, my mama baked them her whole life and she's in her 90s now, and she basically used the same recipe I still use, found here.

Sometime I might write a post over on Dewena's Window about my two months of cooking from the pantry...

fridge and freezer...

supplemented with cornbread...

and gifts from our mini-garden...

and generous garden gifts from a brother-in-law...

(our 4th bag of fresh cut okra that gave us many dinners of fried okra...)

(and fried okra salad...)

(and Okra Creole)

And mighty good eating it all was, still...

When I finally was making up a grocery list this weekend, what did RH and I both crave?

Ham and Biscuits!

And was it ever good for Sunday dinner!

(Ham recipe here.)

I figure that big ham will give us many suppers and breakfasts, with a ham bone left for another big pot of pinto beans. 

[yes, I like ham the color of red mahogany,

just like Frances Gray Patton here]

And there's leftover buttermilk so I'm thinking of James Beard's Buttermilk Basil Bread and maybe the sweet tea buttermilk pie that looks amazing on the current cover of Garden & Gun magazine.

Now I need to figure out what to do with odds and ends of things left in the pantry. What can I do with a can of condensed milk, a can of cherry pie filling, a box of cake flour, more sardines, and a jar of orzo?

I'll google it.