My Thanksgiving ham is still...preserved

[cashew]

I bought some ham over Thanksgiving because...well, I'm not really much of a cooking person and I don't really feel the need to have a lot of fancy home cooking. Thanksgiving was always just a holiday that provided an excuse to get fed by friends (😘😚 to tanithryudo).

Point is, I don't do this cooking for guests unless it's Chinese New Year and I don't apologize for it.

Anyway, since COVID-19 has completely killed any get togethers, I went out and bought some ham because all the turkeys are big and housemate vetoed deli turkey for T-Day. So, ham it is. Heavily processed and pre-packaged ham. Which tastes just fine, honestly. It's not like we were going to be eating gourmet foods anyway in the middle of a pandemic.

Naturally, post-Thanksgiving, I've completely forgotten about it and looked in only today to find...the ham perfectly preserved. So, given the high correlation between preservatives and dementia, I'm pretty sure I'm going to die an unnatural death. Yeah, I'm not optimistic about my chances against age-related diseases. (I'm getting to that age where this shit is on my mind, LOL, time sucks. 😭)

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Meanwhile, I have a third of the Avengers: End Game Fix-It fic plotted. I'm actually committing myself to this.
(〃￣︶￣)人(￣︶￣〃)

Comments

[tanithryudo]

Uhm... was it in the refrigerator all this time or was it out in the open and still preserved? Because if it's the latter...yikes.

Then again... I've been watching videos on traditional chinese cuisine lately, and the way they make ham there (handed down for hundreds of years) seems to just be smothering the pork hind leg in lots of salt and then hang it up to wind-dry, and that will stay preserved like that for a year (multiple years?).

So, maybe it's not that bad?

[cashew]

Thankfully, food was still in the fridge, which makes it only slightly better. Also, wind-dry food staying preserved is fine, because the preservation method is to starve the bacteria and fungi of the water they need to grow, so it's safe to eat. The ham I had was juicy (aka wet), which is...ick... So, the liquid had some very bad chemicals to kill off bacterial growth, which is how I managed to still eat it without getting food poisoning. (Of course, I'm just kicking the problems down the line for when I'm much older and will probably suffer from dementia.)