HELLO AND WELCOME BACK FOODIE FOLLOWERS!!!

Happy New Year!!  I am rearing to go for 2018, back at work already since the 2nd of January and the big events are all already lining up!

 

We have something on pretty much every weekend now until March!!!!  Our lovely neighbours are coming over for a big meaty meal this weekend, there are a few 40th birthday parties, a reunion with school friends, a baby shower, Australia Day, Gwennie’s first day of school (*faint*), my brother’s birthday (a significant one too) party is going to be HU-UGE, MY BIRTHDAY (or should I say “Birth-week”), a conference in Melbourne and CHINESE NEW YEAR IS JUST AROUND THE CORNER!!!! I am  also planning a little collaboration dinner blog with a good friend of mine, Marnie (and champagne blogger from “Bubble and Flute”) – sooo exciting!!

Also there might be a little exciting project in the pipelines for the “Paeds” part of the blog too coming soon… so stay tuned.

Holy smokes, hold onto your hats.

 

So let’s ease ourselves into the food-blogging year shall we? 

Christmas was epic in our house a few weeks ago.  We hosted Troy’s family and I created a 10 course menu.  Crazy.  I literally prepped WEEKS in advance. The courses included:

• The biggest charcuterie/fromage board I have ever created in my life
• A turducken roast (roast chicken, inside roast duck, inside roast turkey)
• Chicken and shiitake mushroom noodles
• Miso and maple glazed ham x2
• Traditional fried rice
• Pomegranate and orange salad
• Feta and beetroot salad
• Mango, avocado and macadamia nut salad
• 9 dozen fresh oysters & Tiger prawns
• Christmas Jelly cake
• Petit fours (including Christmas crack, date and cacao bliss balls, apricot snowballs, triple-choc fudge butter brownie cubes with fairy dust)The

It was delicious… and exhausting.  OF course accompanied by copious champagne!  Boxing Day was the Christmas celebration for my family at my sister’s house, and my contribution was some cheeses and cured meats, a 3 layer chocolate snowman cake and petit fours.

Needless to say, I gained 2kg in 5 days (*face palm*).

So I did post a pic of the gorgeous glazed hams on Instagram (follow me @drmeggsiecooks) and a wonderful work colleague of mine (that’s you Dr Looi!!) requested the recipe.

So here it is.  Very easy, very Asian inspired (as was the rest of my fusion Christmas meal). You can use this glaze on any kind of meat – chicken, salmon, pork whatever.

I chose to use boneless hams as although not traditional, they are (a) easier to fit in the oven with the other roasts (b) sooo much easier to carve.  This recipe was enough glaze for BOTH hams (both weighed about 700-800g).

 

INGREDIENTS

• 90 ml maple syrup
• 3 tablespoons white miso paste
• 3 tablespoons (45 ml) olive oil
• 2 green  (spring) onions, finely chopped 

• 1 tablespoon (15 ml) sambal oelek (a type of chilli paste/sauce – you can often get this in the Asian food aisle at Woolies/Coles)
• 1 teaspoon (5 ml) curry powder
• 1/2 teaspoon (2.5 ml) Sichuan peppercorn, crushed
• 2 x 800g boneless leg hams (or other roast) for glazing

Now the glaze is a little spicy.  I love a bit of heat in my food, but you can omit the sambal oelek and curry powder if you want a mild, non-spicy glaze.  Instead I’d suggest substituting a couple of cloves of crushed garlic and maybe 4cm of microplaned ginger so you still get max flavour with minimum spice.

METHOD

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees
2. Mix all your ingredients together in a bowl
3. Using a pastry brush, apply glaze generously to ham
4. Place in oven for 1 hour, liberally reapplying glaze at 30 min

 

That’s it.

Delish!

Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease help me by hitting SHARE on Facebook and if you try a recipe out – be sure to let me know how you go and if you liked it!!  A pic would be awesome too!!!

 

Until next recipe,

Happy eating!!

 

xxDr Megs