A sweet treat: Honey roasted ham with roasted rosemary baby potatoes, chantenay carrots and Italian baked fennel

Getting my sweet fix from roast ham

There’s no finer dinner than a roasted ham joint. (Well in my opinion anyway) Readers as you can see, my recent array of recipes are all savoury. It is unfortunately still Lent and I’m still on that dedicated track where I have given up everything sweet, including my beloved cakes, biscuits, desserts and chocolate. After the first couple of weeks, I got over the cravings and find myself reasonably settled in my sweet free world, until I look at other cookery blogs and begin to pine for baking and eating an array of sweet delights.

This morning’s downfall was reading baking blogger, Lucie Phelps’ blog.It contained such an assortment of delicious and  amazing bakes, it had me drooling in front of my computer. As someone who looks after their diet, after losing a substantial amount of weight, going off everything sweet has been decidedly hard on my own nutrition. There’s only so much natural sugar you can get from fruit before you get bored. In my Lent, jam is allowed, but when you find yourself sitting digging a spoon in the jar of conserve you think is it really worth it putting my body through this?

I think maybe next year, I will have to have a rethink, but there are other ways to get a sweet kick and my honey-roasted ham joint is one such dish. (Continue to read for my method.)

Roast ham is a perfect year-round meal. It would be perfect over Easter weekend, now I come to think about it. It can also be delicious served cold in Summer with salad and warming in Winter served with all the usual roast trimmings. My mum loves to make ham with cauliflower cheese but I decided I wanted to make my ham with a different accompaniment.Normal roast dinner vegetables can often get monotonous. Fennel is a great vegetable which is often overlooked, so I decided that I would accompany my roast ham with a baked Italian fennel dish.

Fennel and celery to be baked as an alternative accompaniment

Honey-roasted ham with roasted rosemary baby potatoes, Chantenay carrots and baked fennel

A delicious roast for all of the family

What you need
Roast of uncooked ham
Baby potatoes (dependant on how many servings)
Sunflower oil
Rosemary (dried or fresh)
Honey, to glaze ham
Chantenay carrots
2-3 fennel bulbs, cut into quarters
2 celery sticks, cut into 3inch sticks
200g passata
2-3 tsp oregano
Parmesan, for shavings
salt and pepper, for seasoning

Method

1)Taking my ham joint (from Ewbank’s butchers, Appleby- which is a great Cumbrian family-run butchers but will soon be closing and will sorely be missed) out of the fridge, I wrap it, complete with its string, in tin foil.

Ham ready to be covered completely in tin foil before roasting

I put it in a large roasting dish and pop it in the oven at 180C for two hours. (Some people still soak uncooked ham before cooking. But this is an old myth, well for the UK it is. I take Nigella Lawson’s authority that if you live in the UK then you don’t need to soak ham in advance as the cure on most hams is relatively mild. In the US however, hams tend to be very salty and need to be soaked prior to cooking.)

A very old but reliable roasting dish

2)In the meantime prepare the potatoes by covering them in sunflower oil and coating with a sprinkling of rosemary. When you take the ham out of the oven after two hours, pop in the potatoes for 40-45mins.

Potatoes covered in oil and rosemary ready for roasting

3)After roasting the ham in the tinfoil for two hours, take it out. Unwrap the tin foil, snip off the string, cut of the rind and baste with a substantial amount of honey to cover it. Push down the tin foil so it’s no longer covering the ham. Pop it back in the oven for half an hour.

Basting the ham with honey and its juices

4) Boil the carrots, once cooked, put in a dish and reheat in the microwave before serving with a knob of butter. While cooking the carrots, prepare the fennel accompaniment. Bring a pan of water to the boil and add the fennel and celery. Cook for 10mins, then drain.

Cook the fennel for 10mins in boiling water

Place the fennel and celery in an ovenproof dish and pour over the passata and sprinkle oregano. Cut shavings of parmesan, add to the top of the fennel dish and pop it in the oven for 20mins.

Shaving the parmesan

fennel in ovenproof dish

3) Take the ham out of the oven after the half an hour has elapsed and rest for 15 mins so that the juices go back into the meat, then carve the meat.

carving the roast ham