Recipe Box Project

Yes, this post is about deviled ham; no, it is not about deviled eggs, though those are awesome. Today was a surprise stressful day- one of those days that dawns like any other, but a routine appointment turned into an all-morning affair, which meant arranging for someone to hang out at our flat to wait to let in the boiler repair guy who was running late and didn't arrive until shortly after I got home. He was supposed to be doing routine maintenance but quickly realised that our entire boiler somehow needs to be moved UP 15 centimetres in the wall, and while he was doing that, the Council showed up to check on why our back garden is flooding and needed to dye the water in my sink an ecto-plasmic green to see where the blockage is, totally freaking Holtzmann out and did I mention that the boiler guy is scared of dogs?

After they all left and I recovered from the stress of the morning and re-assembled my kitchen, I decided to make the dinner* I had already bought ingredients for, deviled ham and eggs, getting angrier and angrier as I realised that this, too, was probably not going to go to plan and I was going to be left with an unpleasant breakfast-for-dinner situation after my unpleasant appointment, boiler, sink and dog situations of the day. So I angrily chopped ham and snipped chives (have you ever tried to snip things angrily? It doesn't work very well) and mixed then tasted then mixed some more and... suddenly I had deviled ham so delicious I didn't want to wait for dinner because I was too busy eating it off of a spoon at 5pm.

And if I ever thought deviled ham could make my day brighter, may the good lord strike me down as I type, but here we are. This is kind of a freebie recipe because it's the printed meal recommendation on the back of the recipe for last week's rice pudding, but I decided to make it anyway because, I guess, I'm a sucker for punishment (or so I thought, until I made it). But then I made it, and, surprise, it was delicious. Having no access to tinned or prepared deviled ham, I made my own, and thus got to make it as spicy as I wanted, which, after the day previously described, was VERY. In the process of so doing, I looked up deviled ham recipes and learned that the Underwood Deviled Ham logo is the oldest trademarked logo still in use in the US, which is pretty cool and very random since I swear I've never seen it before (except, maybe, when previously making deviled ham for this quiche). Anyway, after reading a whole bunch of recipes to get the gist of what should go in deviled ham (I haven't made it except for the aforementioned quiche, and I couldn't really remember how to do so), I personalised the recipe to my tastes and it was great. This means it's not a super authentically 1950s deviled ham, but if you like spice, ham, eggs and breakfast foods, this is for you and you should totally try it on the weekend. Best served, according to the recipe card, with ideal coffee, but it works equally well with sparkling water and a tomato salad.

If you're not into the idea of deviled ham with eggs as a main course, whip yourself up a batch of the ham anyway and serve it with crispy crackers. It's awesome.

*This dish is technically supposed to be for breakfast, but I didn't want to wait for the weekend so we had breakfast for dinner and COME AT ME if you want to discuss whether this is stupid.

The verdict:

5 spoons out of five. Deviled ham plus scrambled eggs plus toast equals comforting breakfast food guaranteed to kick a hangover on the weekend or, you know, improve your weekday by 34%.

one year ago: smash the patriarchy party mix
two years ago: Garbanzo bean soup

the recipe:

Deviled Ham with Scrambled Eggs

the directions:

Chop ham coarsely.
Stir in cream cheese, hot sauce and mustard, a little at a time, until desired consistency and flavour is reached.
Add chives, parsley, lemon juice and pepper and mix well.
Taste and add salt if needed (mine didn't) or additional hot sauce (mine did, but that's because I wanted blow-your-head-off levels of heat).
Set aside mixture while you softly scramble two eggs per person and toast 1 slice of bread per person.

Pile scrambled eggs and deviled ham on top of toast and enjoy!

the ingredients:

200g (approx. 4 slices) ham slices, cut thick
60g (scant ¼ c) cream cheese
1 tbsp hot sauce (preferably Frank's Red Hot)
1 tsp mustard (preferably whole grain)
1 tbsp snipped chives
2 sprigs torn parsley
½ tsp lemon juice
½ tsp black pepper

1 slice of toast per person
2 eggs, softly scrambled, per person

Judson has been called away to London for a few days for work, so I’ve been home by myself this week. I love London a lot more than Judson does, so while I am jealous, I’m trying to rein in my jealousy and take advantage of this unexpected solo time to make recipes I know he doesn’t like. Our tastes mostly align pretty well, but there are definitely a handful of things I like much more than he does (Tacos! Macaroni cheese! Anything with sriracha! Breakfast-for-Dinner!), and firmly rooted in this category is anything involving cheese. Before we were married, we used to joke about how my go-to meal when I was having dinner alone was ‘Single Girl Surprise,’ basically macaroni and cheese with whatever veggies I happened to have leftover in my fridge (usually peas).*

This was obviously before I knew how to cook things like prime rib, salmon, crab, and other things. Sorry, 20-something Blair, for not learning how to cook sooner.

Anyway, Judson is gone this week and I have been plunged back into the lands of ‘single girl surprise,’ which, this time around, still involves pasta, though I have graduated beyond boxed macaroni cheese. So in honour of being alone for the week, here’s a riff on the OG Single Girl Surprise of my 20s… I give you: Creative Casserole.

This is not actually a casserole at all, but it does involve that most dreaded of ingredients: Spam. I’ve been putting off making this forever, partly because it’s on the reverse of a much tastier recipe, partly because it’s not a super healthy meal, and mostly, let’s not kid ourselves, because it contains Spam and I didn’t want to be known as a person who has ever purchased (let alone cooked with) Spam.

I haven’t actually tasted Spam since I was a kid and we used to take it on camping trips, but it is, to be fair, not nearly as terrible as I assumed it would be. That said… it’s still Spam. Not quite ham, definitely not bacon, and housed in a can. If you can get past the inclusion of Spam, this is basically baked macaroni—a dish to which I am not inherently opposed. However, with the inclusion of Spam, it becomes a Creative Casserole you’ll be too embarrassed to try, but you’ll still want to know what the result was. It’s here that I must disappoint you, dear reader. I thought it would be awful—inedible, in fact! I had the curry takeaway order all ready to go in case we needed a last minute emergency dinner in case this one went predictably awry in a blaze of pinwheeled processed-ham glory, but it turned out…ok.

I’m not saying I’m a fan, but if you ignore the triangles of Spam on top (too much for a single bite, in my humble, ex-vegetarian opinion), this isn’t a terrible dish. I mean, we all know ham and cheese go together like gangbusters, and we’ve already established that I subsisted for most of my early 20s on a diet of macaroni and cheese with frozen peas stirred in, so from there, you only have to adjust yourself to the idea of onions in your macaroni, which is not exactly uncommon, and which, in this instance, definitely adds a nice counterpoint to the salty ‘ham’ and sweet peas.** Plus the extra crunch from the still-al-dente onions was definitely welcomed.

I know this isn’t a cool opinion and if I were ever to make this again, I would 100% make it with pancetta instead of Spam, but for an experimental recipe in the quest to make everything in the Recipe Box, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be (or, for that matter, nearly as bad as some other things I’ve made).

*I have a theory that every woman has a recipe for Single Girl Surprise, and they are all different. For a good friend of mine, it's ramen noodles with peanut butter and sriracha mixed into the sauce for a faux-Thai-style curry. Another friend makes refrigerator pasta, which is just pasta with bread crumbs and whatever groceries she has that need to be used up. I'm fascinated by these 'go-to' recipes and always keen to hear what other people's are.

** After saying this at work one too many times, a co-worker recently asked me what 'gangbusters' means, and after looking up its origins, I discovered that it is an American saying dating back to a radio show from the 1940s. Fitting for this blog, I think!