My wife maintains a family website/blog on Baby Home which is based in Taiwan (and therefore in Chinese). It’s primarily about the kids growing up.
One of the unintended side effects is that several Taiwanese mothers located in Arizona have “found” each other and formed a sort of offline group of acquaintances (I believe the old-world term was “circle of friends”.)
They, their kids and husbands get together roughly once a month and eat (a lot.) I generally avoid them because, being predominantly a Taiwanese gathering, it’s just like being in Taiwan at one of those awkward social gatherings where everyone speaks Chinese and occasionally tries to throw me a bone by speaking English.
I like to think of this as Irene’s time to spend with other Taiwanese unfettered by English and the kids’ opportunity to play and absorb their second language.
I can’t always avoid the gatherings and on the 24th we had one at our house.
15 years ago I had a Honeybaked Ham at a work Christmas party and it was the best ham I ever ate. Since then I’ve been looking for an opportunity/excuse to buy one. This seemed like the perfect opportunity!
Never having purchased one, i didn’t know what to expect, and, nothing could have prepared me.
When I arrived with, what I thought, was plenty of time to stand in line and pick up the ham before the gathering, I was stunned to find a line of over 400 people winding around and around the store and the parking lot. They even had Sheriff’s Deputies out acting as crowd control.
Luckily the line moved fairly quickly, and I was 12.5 pound ham-laden in only about an hour and a half.
It was exceptionally good, but the Taiwanese people also brought enough food to feed themselves three times over and we only made a small dent in the ham at the gathering, despite the fact that I had three plates full.
We’ve been having ham for days, but finally the ham-bone has been exposed and I’m going to have some happy puppies this weekend, once I can figure how to split it in two pieces for them.
HoneyBaked Ham: Really, Really good.
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