Ideas for Leftover Ham

Most of my readers know I love coming up with different ideas for leftovers. Some are the basic, but I like to think outside the pan for ideas! LOL Here are a few ideas for leftover ham and meat sauce.

We had a delicious Christmas dinner with Rich’s famous meatballs plus ham, sweet potatoes, scalloped potatoes with sides. Rich made over 200 meatballs since our daughter and her family were down from Virginia and she loves meatballs! Our two granddaughters also love them so I made “to go containers” for all of them, telling them that was their Christmas present! As leftovers, Rich and I had meatball subs, macaroni with meatballs and just meatballs on a plate. We had a large container of spaghetti sauce left over and I planned to freeze it but instead……

The other day I turned the leftover spaghetti sauce into goulash! I started with a pound of ground beef, crumbled and browned it then added the left over sauce to the beef while boiling some pasta. The sauce already had peppers and onions so I didn’t have to add anything else. My goulash was so good and filling. Our neighbor is in the hospital so I took a large container over to her husband and son so they could have a homecooked meal. I still havd leftovers from the leftovers so dinner is all set for another day!

The ham was an 8 pound boneless, glazed spiral cut from Sam’s Club and it was delicious! For ham leftovers I made omelettes, ham sandwiches, fried ham and potatoes and the most tastiest broccoli cheddar cheese soup and I added diced ham to that.

We still had ham slices left and we were getting “hammed” out so I came up with a solution.

I cut the large slices into smaller pieces and put them in my Oster mini chopper. I froze the chopped ham on a cookie sheet so it would freeze loose and put in a freezer bag. I ended up with about a pound of diced ham that I put in the freezer and will be perfect for omelettes and soup. So many soup varieties I can make, split pea, potato, broccoli/cheese for starters. I can pour out just the amount of ham I need for a meal.

Way back in 2016 I wrote a blog about my Hawaiian Sweet Potato Boats filled with ham, pineapple and brown sugar. This will be a great idea for using some of my left over frozen ham and take some updated photos since the ones from 2016 are very amateurish. I have also come up with a variation of this recipe by mixing the ingredients with the potato, adding mini marshmallows and then putting it back in the skins. I’ll post an update on this!

Since it’s January it’s purge the freezers month! I always work on reducing what we have in both freezers in January and don’t stock up on meat or vegetables until what’s there is gone. My only exception is if I see a super deal on beef or chicken….. oh and ice cream!