The jamonero.

When you buy a whole leg of jamón serrano imported from Spain, you're immediately confronted with the problem of how you're going manage the huge, unwieldy, fat-embalmed piece of meat. In a proper Spanish home, your jamón sits on a special rack that makes handling the thing much easier. A whole jamón is pricy, so after you've spent all that money, if you're a sometimes tightwad like me, you'll immediately be too cheap to cough up another $50-60 for a professionally-constructed jamonero to store and sit it up properly. Instead, you'll do this:

1. One 20 inch piece of scrap plywood from the floor of your shed, washed.
2. The finest quality cheap pine stud cut down to about 8 inches.
3. Several zinc-plated brackets to hold the various parts together.
4. The highest quality U-bracket that money can buy at the local Wal-Mart.
5. A heavy-duty piece of foil from a disposable pizza pan to protect the jamón from the possibility of reacting with the zinc-plated brackets and the possibly unsanitary plywood.

Voila! Instant jamonero! And it works pretty good too!

Facts:

The best jamón is jamon iberico de bellota. In the US, a single leg goes for about $1200. Ours is a plain jamón serrano and pricy, too, but not nearly so. Jamón de bellota is so special owing to the acorn-rich diet that the pigs eat for a good part of their life and as well as the extra-long curing process. It's probably the tastiest thing in the world, IMHO.

You store your jamón in a jamonero on your counter (out of reach of dogs) covered by a breathable cloth. It should remain good for months as you slowly eat it up.