Holiday sandwich....

Image hosted by Photobucket.comIf CL has her Holiday Season Soup, I have my "holiday sandwich". :-)

Actually, there's nothing really special about this sandwich of mine, only the fact that I seem to be able to make it only during the holiday season.

It consists of two slices of bread (preferably whole wheat) a slab of holiday ham, a fried egg, a slice of cheese, some pickle chips, and dressed up with mayonnaise and tomato ketchup. Toast it for a few minutes in an oven toaster, and serve with a whole pickle and potato chips on the side. Chock full of calories, and really hits the spot. :-)

I think the main ingredients by themselves explain why I'm only able to make it during the holidays. This is the only time of year that we have "holiday ham". It's not that ham isn't that readily available here, since it is. It's the "holiday" variant, cured just right, a little sweet, and not too salty, with nice marbling, glazed with brown sugar, dripping with sauce made from pineapple puree', which is only marketed during the Christmas season.

Before, we would receive a lot of these hams as gifts. Not anymore though, probably due to times being rather difficult as of late. Now we mostly buy them for the sake of tradition. Somehow we've gotten used to the concept of ham being served during the holidays, and the table would seem to be missing something without it. Much like the other traditional item, queso de bola or ball of Edam cheese. Another regular of Filipino dining tables during the holidays, and also the second most important ingredient of my "holiday sandwich".

I surmise we inherited these customs from the Spaniards during the time when they still colonized the Philippines. I'm not really familiar with Filipino food history, so I could be wrong. I'm pretty sure though that queso de bola came from the Spaniards. Up to the present day we even still refer to that ubiquitous (during the Christmas season) ball of cheese covered in red wax by its Spanish name.

It is because of the yuletide that we find our household with an artifical abundance of these foods. And the easiest, and probably most efficient way of serving these is, well, you guessed it, by making a sandwich.

I'm just enjoying it while it lasts. It'll be another year before I see another Christmas ham. :-)

As Homer Simpson would say: Mmmmm...ham sandwich. :-)

Links:

Christmas customs in the Philippines - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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