Thanksgiving, nontraditional

Every year since 1995, I have cooked a turkey for Thanksgiving, or if we were traveling, for Canadian Thanksgiving. After trying several recipes, I settled on the Cooks Illustrated brine-air dry-start breast side down-flip midway through roasting method, with the stuffing cooked in a separate pan.

But not this year. We have been wanting to try a country ham for several years now, and finally decided that this Thanksgiving would be the time to try it. We actually bought a half-ham at Eastern Market. Country hams that have been aged more than 6 months need to be soaked; we figured ours hadn’t been aged that long, and didn’t pre-soak. Hams can be simmered or roasted, and if roasting they’re often simmered first. We simplified things by just simmering.

Except for apple pie, all the other dishes were new recipes for us also; in the past we had done more or less the same menu. We tried sweet potato pie instead of pumpkin pie, and picked three side dishes from Cook’s Country: a mashed potato casserole, cranberry glazed carrots, and creamy peas with goat cheese.

Country ham is potent stuff. Ours probably could have benefitted from soaking; it was quite salty, but very tasty. The other recipes were all successful, and remarkably simple as well. I do think I prefer the aroma of a roasting turkey to that of a simmering ham.