My Experiment with Ham, Cream Sauce from scratch, and what I did with it

A few weeks after Christmas, I found a ham on sale at Aldi.  I LOVE Aldi.  (We'll hit on that later this week, but I can feel my grocery budget stretching just by walking through the doors of that place!)

Anyway, back to the ham, I cooked it for supper a few weeks ago.  And froze the leftover ham.  I think it was an 8 pounder; so far, it has fed us for 2 meals, I blessed my MIL with some (its her fave!), and it was a part of the meal for the family with the new baby.

Here's how I cooked it (Thank you Dawn Reynolds and my Mother for sharing their recipes! I used information from both to cook this ham, since I didn't have some other items on hand):

Ingredients:
Ham
Brown sugar
Sliced Pineapple, canned


Begin with a thawed ham in a roasting pan.  Poke the ham with a toothpick.  Combine 1 cup of brown sugar with the juice from the pineapple can and pour it over the ham.  Using toothpicks, 'pin' pineapple rings on the ham.  Cover and cook at 350 degrees for 15 minutes per pound.  (If its sliced, its supposed to be a little less)

So that was a meal in itself for us (with leftovers, obviously).

The second meal we had was a recipe I got from Heavenly Homemakers (LOVE that site.  If you are looking for new recipes, I would recommend anything over there!).  

It was Ham with Scalloped Potatoes.
I've never made anything with a homemade cream sauce, and, while I had my doubts, it turned out delicious!  (The whole time I was trying to think of what I would make if it didn't turn out, seeing as how I was planning to take a recipe I had never made to a family I had never met!)

You can find the recipe for that here. I adjusted it because I wasn't sure the pineapple/brown sugar cured ham would mess with the taste of the potatoes, so I warmed the ham separately.
The meal was very inexpensive, as a 5 lb bag of large Idaho potatoes cost only $2.69, and I used 4 potatoes (They were large), and the ham has made 3.5 meals and I'm not done with that yet.  I had everything else on hand already.  That doesn't make it less expensive, but it helps!

We'll do a shopping list breakdown later this week for our meals.

On the menu for tonight, Spaghetti, of course.  I'm using this recipe from Keeper of the Home for the spaghetti sauce.  Wish me luck!