Difficulty level Easy

We always have our holiday dinners with my mother. She has a pretty standard repertoire for those events - turkey for Thanksgiving and Christmas, ham for Easter. There are only five of us around the table now, and my son is a vegetarian, so I was a bit surprised to discover that she had cooked a 6 pound ham.

My mother cut off a few slices that she wanted to keep for this week's dinners, then she sent the rest of the ham home with me. My daughter took some when she returned to university and that left us with at least four meals worth of ham for my husband and myself. No doubt I will be tucking it into different dishes over the next few days, but I really wanted to make a concerted effort to make something a bit different so that my husband wouldn't balk and the continuing plates of ham put in front of him.

I'm a big fan of salad type sandwiches, like egg salad, chickpea salad, tuna salad, so I started looking for something interesting to do with ham, rather than slapping it between two slices of bread with a bit of cheese with it. I found this recipe for deviled ham which was quite good. It had a nice bit of heat to it which I quite enjoyed. I cut the ham by hand rather than putting it through a food processor, because I wanted a chunkier texture, and who needs the extra clean up? I think 1 1/2 cups of ham for four would make for a pretty skimpy sandwich. I used 1 cup of ham for 2 people and there was a bit left over, but not enough for another sandwich. I was just wishing I still had some of my own dill pickles left.

INGREDIENTS