Easter has come and gone. And with that comes the true joy of the season - ridiculously cheap hams. I don't even like ham as a meal, but I somehow like ham if it's *in* something. This dish definitely scratches that itch, so every year we run out and grab a ham, to make this and some split pea soup.
This dish that seems to be common in the south, and has about ten names - pilau, perloo, pirloo, purlow, pilaf, plov - so I'm not going to bother guessing at the right spelling of this. The other fun thing is that recipes online range from incredibly bland (cook some rice in what's basically ham water) to incredibly complicated (something resembling jambalaya). The closest I found to something reasonable was one of Emeril Lagasse's recipes, but it needed a bit of tweaking to squeeze out a bit more flavor and cook things in the right order. The recipe below is therefore modified a bit from his website with a few extra ingredients and steps.
This ham purlow dish is far from fancy, but it is definitely memorable. I recommend it if you have leftover ham or want a more mild version of jambalaya.
