Holiday Cooking Failure Part 2

Originally posted on my Friendster blog, January 2, 2009 at 11:56 am

As you can read in my previous post, I failed to understand a direction in a recipe which resulted to additional 3 hours of baking the chicken in the oven. I guess that wasn't enough lesson for me to be careful next time because "ooops! I did it again" as Britney Spears says. But this time, it was a different case...and worse. You may call me dumb, stupid, careless, or whatever you please but I'll still blog about it anyway.

It's a Filipino tradition to eat dinner at 12 am of December 31, the very first hour of New Year. I didn't do it last year which was my first New Year in the US but decided to start doing it again beginning this year with my husband and will make it a family tradition when we have a kid/kids already. So at about 9 pm on December 31, I began cooking. Again, I made more than enough for 2 persons to eat because I wanted leftovers for the next couple of days. I made pineapple ham, teriyaki chicken, brownies, and pansit(an Asian noodle that is present in every Filipino household during special occasions because according to Filipino and Chinese superstition, it represents long life. Yea, I'm kinda superstitious.) I wanted to make a sweet potato casserole too but didn't have enough time, it was almost 12 am when I was done cooking the last recipe. Everything came out great except for the ham. I cooked it according to the recipe direction but didn't like the result. The meat wasn't very tender. I like my ham to almost fall apart when I slice it. That night neither I nor my hubby ate the ham though he tried a slice. I hate throwing food so I just let the ham sit in the fridge until I figured out later what to do with it.

Yesterday all other food I cooked for the New Year was almost gone. At night after dinner, I decided to slowcook the ham. I remembered that on Thanksgiving, I cooked my ham in the slowcooker at low temperature for 10 hours and the result was perfect that my husband devoured it. It was a fully-cooked ham and this one I got for New Year is smoked. I figured that maybe a smoked ham needs longer cooking time than a fully-cooked ham. So I set it to 15 hours at low. Calculating the time, it would be done in the morning the next day (which is today.) So, I woke up at 9 this morning and immediately checked the slowcooker on the counter. It still had 1 minute and 3o+ seconds left. But when I checked the ham, this is what greeted me:

That's why it's important to cook more than one recipe

Before I decided to cook it "better".