Sweet Ham Recipe for Noche Buena
Processed Ham these days are very expensive but you can surely prepare your very own Sweet Ham for Noche Buena. Here is a Sweet Ham recipe that has been tested many times in our kitchen. Though it is not free of preservatives, it uses very small doses of salitre. It tastes really good with the Pineapple Sauce, recipe is shown below the Sweet Ham preparation.
Ingredients
3 kilos (pigue or hita) pig’s leg without the bones; select one with the skin and fat intact
9 Tbsps sugar
8 tbsps salt
1-1/2 tsps msg or vetsin
2 tsps prague powder (instead of saltpeter or salitre) – In Manila, you can probably buy salitre at Chocolate Lover, a supplier of baking and cooking supplies
Posted: November 30th, 2008 under Noche Buena, Pork, Recipes.
Comments: 3
Preparing Suman sa Ibus is so easy. It’s the wrapping of the rice mixture which takes so much time. Yet it is all worth it. How I love the mild flavor of the suman. The delightful combination with ripe yellow mangoes and hot tsokolate is heavenly. 
I have been receiving quite a few emails requesting for a Humba recipe. I remember Humba quite well as I grew up eating this tasty dish in my growing years in Cebu. The tausi or black beans created quite a distinct contrast to the sweetness of the pork. It’s been quite a while since I cooked Humba. It was actually the readers’ emails that inspired me to cook it today for lunch. Let me show you a few emails that inspired me to cook it today.
What do you associate puto with? When pork was still part of my diet, I associated puto with diniguan. I dunk the puto on the thick sauce, then eat it together with the pork pieces. Another puto memory is pairing it with hot chocolate drink. Puto is a great pairing food with many of our Filipino dishes. Puto is very easy to make. You can even use all-purpose flour instead of rice flour if one cannot find the latter. In this recipe, we will use all-purpose flour
Baking sugar cookies are not my cup of tea. It’s labor intensive. I’d rather bake bar cookies because they are so much easier. You dump all the dry, wet, mix and voila, one gets a yummy cooky. Not with sugar cookies. Whenever I bake sugar cookies, my kids know it’s a labor of love. It’s the love that makes me continue on with this tradition even if they are now adult children. Let me share with you the Christmas Sugar cookies that have been a continuing Christmas tradition for the past twenty years in my family. You can even prepare sugar cookies weeks ahead before you give them to your friends and relatives. Just store them in a cool, dry container.
I don’t do all the cooking at home. Sometimes it could be my husband, or on rare occasion, my daughters or my trusted helper, Diding. When I took a recent vacation in the USA, Diding took care of the cooking while I was away. She also paid my bills and basically run the house while my husband was at work. Paksiw na Pata is a simple dish which she cooked the other night. Of course, she can cook more complicated ones which I have taught her. I take pride when my helpers cook better than me or start a restaurant business once they leave my employment. One of the yayas of the kids has now her own small restaurant using the dishes she learned from me. Diding isn’t really fond of cooking but I prodded her to learn. Once she cooked the paksiw na pata, I told her to set it up on a white plate so I could take a photo.