Uncured ham and cheese

Psyche! This is not a ham and cheese sandwich, but it's close. It's more akin to an antipasti except elaborated with ham and bread into a full meal.

Ham, smoked but not cured. Funny dat. I always thought smoking was a form of curing. Apparently, not so. With hams, curing is either dry or wet. Dry = rubbing with salt, or some form of nitrates or nitrites, usually involves re-hydration following the curing process. Wet = emersion in some sort of brine mixture. A smoke-cured ham, like speck purports to be, is cured with salt then smoked.

I have to admit to a bit of a nose bleed at check out. I justified the cost by comparing with packaged luncheon meats to which I've become quite fond for combining with apples for healthy and satisfying snacks. It pisses me off you get so few slices and the packages are so expensive. When I visualized how many packages it would take to equal the cost of this, they're thin packages so just a few packages would equal 1/4 the mass of this, well, there you have it. SOLD !

You know, six to ten of these could knock the edge right off the pangs of hunger -- knock the edge off like a steak knife used as a screwdriver, knock the edge off like Russell Brand edited for the Disney channel, knock the edge off like diluting a shot of tequila with a gallon of orange juice, knock the edge off like a ... like a ... chunk of balsa wood in a high power lathe.

* the bread is home-made
* the mozzarella is home-made
* smoked but not cured ham
* non-hothouse tomatoes
* Aerogarden basil
* olive oil drizzled liberally