Mango-mustard Ham Recipe

How to make it

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• Make sure that you pick a ham that will fit in your biggest pot with a lot of water. This is probably the most important part!
• Cut all the gross, brown skin off of the ham. Use a really sharp knife and be careful. I like to put the ham in the sink to do it, and it helps to have the garbage can nearby. When you're done, give it a rinse and toss it into the stockpot.
• Cover with water (it's ok if the shank sticks out a bit -- nobody is going to fight over the end)
• Toss in some bay leaves, a couple of cinnamon sticks and some cloves. They're not really going to do much to the meat, but it'll smell better.
• Bring the ham to a boil and let it go for about twenty minutes.
• Pour out the water and refill the pot. This is important! You're trying to leach the salt and sundry weirdness out of the ham, leaving it a blank slate to absorb the delicious rub with which you're going to slather it.
• Boil it again! The water shouldn't be quite as gross this time.
• Remove the ham from the pot and pat dry with paper towels.
• Place in a roasting pan of some kind.
• Prepare a glaze of brown sugar, juice, yellow mustard, garlic (yes, garlic), clove powder, and cinnamon. This can be to your taste. I make a rather thick paste so it'll adhere to the ham.
• Cover the ham with the glaze, using a brush.
• You can do that Betty Crocker thing with the pineapple rings and the cloves if you want to be all classy about it. I usually don't, because it takes a lot of time, and I want to get to the eating part.
• If you'd like, you can pop it in the fridge until you're ready to stick it in the oven. You've boiled the heck out of it already, so the oven is just to set the glaze and essentially turn the ham into candy. Mmm....meat candy...
• Crank up your oven to 250, and slap a little more glaze on the ham
• Slide the ham in the oven for about 10 minutes, re-glazing as necessary.
• Eat! Trust me, you're not going to have a dry piece of meat.
• Save the bone for black beans, garbanzo bean soup, split pea soup, navy bean soup, just about any soup, really. It will probably improve a bowl of Capn' Crunch.