Sicilian fried dough balls

It's a Christmas thing, apparently. They say so. It must be Christmas then in my mind. These two delightful birds, Hilah and Mel, entertained me tremendously. They're making dough balls with pizza tidbits inside them.

They are funny to me, they are not used to dough, but I am. I do this dough thing like one makes morning coffee. Bad analogy if you switch on a machine, but I'm comparing the real deal of coffee process, making dough is the same as that, just pour things into a bowl and stir with a dinner knife. Then you have a surly shaggy dough wad and rub it between your hands to make a snake. The weight of the dough stretches, the wad drops down but the stretch is tight and tends to break as you roll it. Even minor rolling is sufficient kneading because the weight is swinging around like a weighted pendulum but I usually do this vigorously. I play with the dough snake, fold it in half and let its weight stretch it as I sort of fire-stick rub the snake tail between my hands. The dough's elasticity develops right there in your hands, you can feel the dough change from unruly uncooperative tense and sticky to lined up and cooperative you feel it become elastic and smooth in your hands. That's the way to go. With dough. 

Or it can be done in 3 seconds in the Cuisinart with the blade. 

But then you don't get to play with it and you have to drag out he Cuisinart, clean it, put it away. And that's a bummer. 

So, they're very amusing because of their dough-uncertainty. But this idea of putting pizza bits inside is excellent. I tried a similar idea with pâte à choux but it wasn't so great and I thought next time think: the same amount of meaty tidbit to cheese as you would have with a tiny pizza. My mistake was stuffing the baked gougères with too much shredded chicken. Both those and these take a distressingly small amount of meat filling. 

It hardly seems worth it. 

But they are worth it. When I made these they were unbelievably satisfying, a not so sweet doughnut with savory elements. They fry in one minute and best right then, less good after they cool. 

I love honey-baked ham.

The one I bought was not the best. It's what was available at the store at the moment. I could doll it up a little. 

When you get down to here the spiral cuts no longer work. The blade skips over the bone so the meat must be chipped away from the bone.

This is ham diced finely with two types of cheese, Robusto and feta. Both of them are fantastic. This is showing the size, very small. The bag is leftover from this project and mixed together for something else, not before this project where the cheese is still separate. I'm still working on this ham. There are still a few tiny bits left.

I am one person living here. I have no business buying a large spiral cut ham, better to buy slices at the deli, but I don't care. The thing is going to sit in there for a long time and I don't care about that either. And I must have at it like a rodent until it is gone or else it is wasted. Of all the things that I made out of this ham, and there were a lot and they were all good, and when I got down to the bone, the marrow drawn from that for Swiss chard and beans was just spectacular, you never see that, even that was not so good as these. These are the best things that came from the ham after the spiral cuts became useless. Thank you, Ladies, you are fantastic and adorable and this idea is easy and fun.