Delay, Delay, Delay

Today is D-Day for the freezers. With the exception of a few special occasion items (a loaf of pound cake, homemade chicken stock, a small beef tenderloin) and high-turnover basics (frozen pizza dough and sauce, small containers of the spinach pesto I made just a few days ago, frozen fruit for smoothies, frozen biscuits) anything we have not managed to eat in the past 2 weeks is getting pitched tonight (I'm looking at you, green beans, lima beans, and unidentifiable-something-red-in-a-large-ziplock-bag). On one hand, it really is painful to throw away perfectly good food (though query if it's really 'perfectly good' if we don't eat it even when we're trying to clean out the freezer). On the other hand, forcing myself to go through this exercise twice each year does help me be more mindful of what goes in the freezer in the first place.
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Frozen biscuits are definitely a freezer staple. Like all good Southerners, we love ham biscuits for breakfast. I find it tough to make these during the week, however, because between the time it takes to preheat the oven and then to bake the biscuits, I start to run late. Most mornings I have 15-20 glorious minutes to myself in the kitchen before hungry little boys arrive Demanding Breakfast Now, and in that time I need to have coffee, empty the dishwasher, make breakfast, and pack a lunch. For three mornings in a row I tried to remember to come out and preheat the oven before getting dressed, so it would be ready and waiting for me to pop the biscuits in, but really - who can manage even a small change in routine at 6:00am? Finally it occurred to me. If I use the "delay start" function to get the oven preheated, I can set it the night before. Voila. I now have time to do ham biscuits in the morning, much to every one's delight. That's what we had for breakfast this morning. I served the boys and asked them to wait just a second so I could run and get my camera to take a picture for the blog. When I returned less than 90 seconds later, this was all that was left:

Product Placement

Today's post may sound like a tacky product placement, but I promise it is not. I just believe in passing along a good food tip whenever I stumble across one.
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Once it appeared we had all survived the stomach virus this past weekend, we piled in the car for our annual trip to visit my sister-in-law and her gorgeous family (two girls the same ages as our boys, lucky us). Since I am on the receiving end of these visits myself once each year, I know how hard it is to feed the entire crowd. The adults tend to be a pretty easy going crowd so long as there's a bottle of Pinot Noir open (a shared love between my brother-in-law and myself), but the kids can be any combination of We Eat Anything And Everything And We Want More Now or We Eat Nothing Don't Even Ask Us To Try It or We Would Have Eaten It But My Brother/Sister/Cousin Looked At It First And Now It Is No Good, and everywhere in between. Combine that with iffy travel schedules (will they arrive in time for lunch? dinner? It's anybody's guess!), and you're talking a food planning nightmare.
My sister-in-law, however, has this particular dilemma solved. Here's what she had on hand:

A HoneyBaked ham. But this was not the ham we are used to getting, the one that lasts you a week and you go to the fridge thinking, finally, we're finished with that damn ham but you open the fridge and there it is, staring at you, with another 8 pounds of meat to go before you can justify tossing it. No, she got a mini-ham. Brilliant. It was just the right size for the 8 of us to have for dinner that night, on biscuits the next morning for breakfast, and then Poof! Gone before the party was no longer fun. I can only hope she's saying the same thing about us...

Leftovers!

If you have a recipe that requires copious amounts of ham, I will pay you money for it. Seriously. Post it NOW. (And bonus points if it requires parsley, rosemary, basil, or thyme, as someone apparently fed my herbs steroids.)

One of the best things about holidays is all the leftover food. Especially when you're the one who hosted, and all that delicious food is sitting in your fridge. Here's my problem, though. I don't know what to do with all the ham. The hard boiled eggs are easy, despite the fact that we have about 24 of them. I can make deviled eggs or egg salad, which will be promptly inhaled by my cholesterol-loving family. But I drew a blank for creative ideas while staring at our leftover ham this morning. A side note: have you ever noticed that in November and December the magazine are all filled with articles about easy leftovers using turkey, but come March or April, not a peep about ham leftovers?

Luckily, Google never lets me down. Here's a recipe for ham scones I found this morning, and we'll be making it this afternoon. Note it includes rosemary - even better!

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/rachael-ray/rosemary-and-ham-scones-recipe/index.html

Dinner tonight: ham scones (I hope), green salad, deviled eggs. Happy eating!