Crockpot Cooking: Ham

Okay, so maybe I lied when I said barbeque chicken and ribs were the easiest thing to make in a crock pot. I completely forgot how easy ham could be. It isn't always, but it can be.

Baked Ham

Ham - whatever type you prefer; raw, pre-cooked, spiral sliced, whatever's on sale - this is my prime consideration, but you can do whatever you want.
Optional ingredients:
Brown sugar               Pineapple
Ground cloves            Rasins

Put your ham in the crock pot. As usual, mine wasn't thawed.

The biggest consideration here is whether or not your ham is small enough to fit in the pot you have. Mine would have fit better if it had been thawed, but there are ways to work around that.

At this point, if you want super easy, you just cover it, turn it on and walk away. But if you want to jazz it up a little you can make your own glaze for it, because you don't want to use the nasty, no-one-can-prounounce-half-the-ingredients package of pre-made glaze it came with, now do you?

So here are the glaze instructions: Mix together some brown sugar(about a cup or so?), a couple sprinkles of ground cloves, the juice from a can of pineapple rings, and a handful or two of raisins in a small pot and heat on medium until the sugar melts. Put the pineapple rings on the ham, pour on the glaze, sprinkle with a bit more brown sugar and cloves (if desired), and then cover and cook. You may need to baste the ham a time or two before serving. I wouldn't do this if the ham was going to cook most of the day because the sugar would burn on the sides of the pot, but you could do it a little before serving time, or if your ham only needed to cook a few hours. As much as I love this (my mom used to do ham this way) I don't do it very often because hubby doesn't like glazes on ham.

If your ham doesn't quite fit you can cover it with aluminum foil, making sure the edges don't hang over the sides of the pot. Mine will fit once it's thawed, but this will get it started.

Then put the lid on the best you can and turn it on. Unless your ham was way too big and the lid doesn't go on at all, it will cook just fine. If your ham is way too big, you can cover it with multiple layers of foil, crimping the edges down as tightly as you can around the top of the pot.