Recipe from Forever Summer.

As a huge fan of Hawaiian pizza, the combination of ham and pineapple is one I am always happy to receive. Growing up, ham and pineapple was a dish I was cooked fairly often, though the pineapple came from a tin and was displayed in ring-form atop thick slices of pink gammon steak. When this recipe from Forever Summer was chosen using the Meal Wheel, I was instantly looking forward to this week’s ‘make’ based on my love of these flavours.

The recipe instructs the cook to boil the gammon joint in a pan, with the meat covered with pineapple juice and water, and here I came across my first problem. I always thought the largest of my three saucepan set was big enough to cope with most things, this was a recipe for four people, after all, not a feast for ten! However, the meat couldn’t be fully submerged as the joint itself came up to the rim of the pan, so I flitted with the dial every time the liquid started to boil as it would almost straight away boil over onto the hob. The perfectly round gammon started to puff up like an inflatable pillow as it boiled, taking in the liquid as it’s mass increased. This caused the issue of keeping the meat submerged to become more of an issue, eventually I gave up trying to squadge it down with a potato masher and decided I would simply turn the meat over halfway through it’s two hour bath… I didn’t get food poisoning, so it must have been ok in the end. 

Should I have had a suitable pan from the off, this would have been a very easy meal to prepare and make. Once the ham is boiling away, you get around the making the pineapple relish / salsa topping to accompany it. This is where we say goodbye to the pineapple rings from my youth and Google how do you cut a pineapple? Very simply as it happens. And once the pineapple has been cut into small pieces, mixed with onion, mint (or coriander but ASDA didn’t have any fresh in stock, honestly…what a world), and lime juice, you mix it together and the flavour slides across the slices of ham making each taste contain a spritely zing (oh and a green chilli, that also contributes to the zing!). 

This is a great one for a summer’s feast, I ate it hot fresh out the pan, but it’s also super cold as I enjoyed it for the rest of the week (I had a whole joint to myself, lots of ham sandwiches and ham, egg and chips followed, no complaints here). 

At the end of it, I had enough pineapple left over to snack on for a couple of days… so healthy, so tropical, so ready for a holiday to Hawaii already!