My initial post about Tested Tried and True (Junior League of Fling, Michigan, Incorporated, second printing April 1976) marveled at how this cookbook was content to mingle recipes for lobster-stuffed tenderloin with rolls made of beer and Bisquick. Other than the contrasts between expensive socialite-type recipes and humble family fare, I also noticed a real love of rolled-up ham. Here's a little post dedicated to Flint's love of salted smoked pig in roly-poly form.
The love starts early, as the chapter on foods kids can prepare themselves suggests.
Start the kids off with Ham Roll-Ups! It's as easy as rolling a tablespoon of cottage cheese in a slice of ham.
Of course, once they're grown-ups, the rolled-up ham has to get a little fancier. Here are some adult-appropriate appetizers.
If you assumed that Ham and Egg Rolls would be in egg roll wrappers, you're wrong. Ham is still the wrapper. It's just filled with chunks of sautéed veggies, bread crumbs, hard boiled eggs, and salad dressing, then baked under a coat of cheese and served with Bloody Marys. Much more sophisticated than the cold cottage cheese kiddy version!
If you want a main dish with rolled up ham, there's Chicken Hawaii Kai.
Does anybody have an idea of why this is considered Hawaiian? I mean, it really just looks like Chicken Cordon Bleu for people who don't like cheese to me.
If your love of ham rolls is such that you want to make rolling ham into a half-day project, then the Hamwiches might be your best bet.
When I see a title like Hamwiches, I expect the recipe to be one of those ham-salad-slopped-on-a-hamburger-bun-then-baked numbers, but this is a real project, starting out with homemade yeasted bread dough flavored with tomato juice and bacon drippings, and ending with slices of ham baked right into crescent rolls. That's a real labor of love! Flint + Rolled-Up Ham = 💖
Now I'm imagining some kid carefully measuring cottage cheese one tablespoon at a time, and a mother pleading with said kid to just dump a glob of cheese on the ham and roll.
ReplyDeleteHa! I can definitely picture that. (I can also picture the opposite, as my mother-in-law is a strictly by-the-instructions cook and I sometimes have to distract her if I'm cooking at her house so she will not be horrified by how fast and loose I am with instructions.)
DeleteSo true. The recipe is just a suggestion. Kind of like sewing and lace making. Some people follow the directions to the letter, and some of us glance at the instructions and the picture, and make it the way it makes sense to.
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