So, I cooked up a bunch of turkeys for friends, neighbors, co-workers etc. on Turkey day. There were 14 smoked and 10 fried turks. I'm a one man operation here, so I was too busy to even think about pics, which is odd because I normally take pics of everything! Well I'm now tired of turkey!
I also re-smoked one of those Cook's precooked half hams for the family. I normally just season the ham and put it on the grate, but this time I put the ham in a pan, cut side down. I removed all of the skin from it and lightly rubbed it with mustard to help the rub stick and then applied a nice heavy coat of rub. Right before it went on the smoker, I hit it again with more rub and then just smoked as normal until it got up to about 160° internal... After removing ham from the pan there was a lot of accumulated juices. Figured I could do something with it so I drained the accumulated juices into a wide mouth mason jar and put the jar into the fridge.
We like what we refer to as bean soup. This is something that we always make when we have leftover ham. I soaked the pintos in water over night and then drained before putting them into the pot, covered with chicken stock and slowly brought them up to a simmer. Now normally, I would add onions, a pepper or two, some rotel etc... but this time, I just went with the beans, chicken stock and ham. As the beans came to a simmer, I put in the leftover ham bone and let it chuckle along for about an hour or so. Then I removed the meat from the bone and added some more left over ham.
The jar of 'juice' (I know there is a technical term for this, but I can't think of it right now) in the fridge had set up nice with the fat at the top. Removed the fat and added the congealed ham juices to pot. I'd guess there was a about a cup +- of it. It also contained a good bit of the rub that I had used on the ham, so these were the only spices in the pot...
Anyway, they turned out great! I will definitely do this again and again.
Here is a pic right after I added the rest of the ham.
Here I have just added more stock to make it soupy... I used about a quart and a half of stock total. I also added those leftover ham 'juices'
Served up with some left over cornbread stuffing. Good Eats!
Now, I may be sick and tired of turkey, but cant let that stuff go to waste. Here are the beginnings of a turkey stock that will get turned into some kind of soup later on.
Love a good bowl of ham and beans. 
