Ham with Cloves and Maple Sauce

Baked Ham with Cloves and Maple Sauce

Ingredients:

• 1 Onion
• 2 Cloves Garlic
• A lot of Whole Cloves, depends on the size of your ham
• 1/2 cup Beef or Vegetable stock
• 1/2 water
• 1 Ham (I used a small cooked Vermont Ham, traditionally cured)
• 1/2 Cup Pure Maple Syrup
• 2 Tablespoons Brown Sugar
• Pepper to taste

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 375°F
2. Thinly slice the onions and the garlic cloves and place in the bottom of the roasting dish. Season with pepper.
3. Place the ham on top of the sliced garlic and onions.
4. Starting from the top of the ham being to stab it with the whole cloves. 
5. Spacing about 1/2 inch apart all over the entire skin of the ham. 
6. Season the ham with pepper.
7. Pour the water and beef or vegetable stock into the roasting pan and cover it all with some tin foil.
8. Bake for about 75 minutes, or until heated and cooked through. 
9. Remove from oven and transfer the ham to plate, cover with tin foil and let it rest for about 10 minutes.
10. In the mean time, make the sauce to go with the ham! 
11. Using a fine strainer, strain the pan drippings into a small pot. 
12. Add the maple syrup and brown sugar. 
13. Stir well to dissolve the sugar and heat over medium heat. 
14. Season with pepper and adjust with any extra seasonings needed. 
15. Sometimes I had a bit of paprika or maybe mustard to it. 
16. Reduce the heat the low and stir occasionally while finishing the ham preparations.
17. Go back to the ham and pull out all the cloves that were stuck into it, and discard the used cloves. 
18. Slice the ham. 
19. By this point the sauce should have thickened slightly and everything is ready to go!
20. Serve sliced ham hot, with the sauce lightly poured over top

Enjoy!

Notes:

So my soon to be husband works a lovely day job and gets off in the afternoon, but I am a slave and work 12 hour days, which makes it rather difficult to get a supper on the table for the two of us on any day that I work. The solution to this of course is to make things ahead of time so that man-friend can be a dear and put it in the oven at the appropriate time and "cook" dinner for the two of us for right when I get home from work. I am told that normal humans accomplish this by just making a million casseroles and freezing them or something equally easy.

The problem is that we are not big casserole people. Actually we never eat any casseroles. That broccoli-chicken casserole made with cream of mushroom soup basically turned me against this form of food in all its many incarnations. So if we aren't going to be eating casseroles, there must be something we can make ahead to cook the next day. My new solution, a simple little roasted ham, with a maple sauce, and I served mine with a spicy mac n' cheese. It was a great success and soon-to-be husband did an excellent job placing both bakeware items in the oven. Good team work!