Ham

Ham is good. After bacon, it's probably the best part of the pig. Yet, most of us only eat a ham if it's a holiday. I was puzzling over this recently when my son asked if he could make a ham for his night making dinner. I couldn't see anything wrong with the idea, ham is good and the boy should know how to cook a ham. It's a useful life skill of sorts.
Now that I have a refrigerator full of left over ham, I see why people generally only cook them when they know that the house will be filled with relatives. A ten pound ham, even after you take out the bone, is quite a lot of meat to eat. We're working at it though.
How to cook a ham:
Most smoked hams are actually already cooked. That's my assumption anyway, because every one that I've ever bought has been. So you're not so much cooking it, as heating it up. You basically want to follow the directions on the ham, something like "cook at 325 for 20-25 minutes a pound, until 100 degrees in center".
Turn the oven to 325
Put the ham, flat/bone side down in a pan and cover with tin foil as tightly as you can.
Roast for 20-25 minutes a pound, so a 10 pound ham would take about 3.5 hours. This is an all afternoon project.
Slice and eat your ham.
That's it. In fact, if it weren't for the fact that ham is so delicious and I feel that it's dramatically under represented on the tables of America, I probably wouldn't bother writing about it. Oh, but then there are the leftovers. Aside from a turkey, nothing has leftovers as good as a ham. Ham sandwiches. Green eggs and ham. Ham steak. Various ham casseroles. And my favorite, split pea soup. Split pea soup is half the reason to have a ham actually. You need to keep your ham bone to make split pea soup, so when you clean up after the meal, don't worry too much about getting the bone clean. Any extra ham stuck to the bone will just make your split pea soup better. Put that bone in a bag and put it in the fridge, because tomorrow or the next day, you need to make soup with it. My next food post will be turning your ham bone into the nest delicious ham based meal. Stay tuned.

Edit for a bit of pork trivia: Ham comes from what you would think of as the butt of the pig, it's rear leg. Pork butt doesn't come from the butt, it comes from the shoulder and contains part of the shoulder blade. It's the thicker part of the front shoulder, or the butt of the front shoulder. The cut that comes from the lower part of the shoulder is called the picnic. I have no idea why it's called the picnic.  Impress your friends in the meat isle with that!