I'd be worried about EVERYTHING in your freezer!

Everything else appears to be frozen solid. This is an upright freezer and the ham was on the bottom shelf. We lost power during Irene but I had thought nothing had thawed but maybe the ham did and never refroze? Maybe my freezer is on its last leg.

check everything...I just had a freezer go bad 2 weeks ago. The appliance salesman told me they were selling lots and lots. They are suspecting the compressors going bad from all the power surges we have been having.

Just took another ham out. It's frozen solid so I'm going to trash the other one.

Check the label on that ham, If it was precooked it is not a problem.

Our refrigerator went out saturday night and we just got the new one delivered at 10am today. In the mean time I took all the frozen meats and packed them in a couple ice chests and now that I have a working freezer again I will thoroughly cook at the meats. Once they have been cooked they can be refrozen safely.

The up side of this mess is that I will have 5 lbs of oven BBQ ribs by supper time tonight.

lazypup - it was precooked but I'm not sure how long it has been sitting half thawed out. I bought the ham in June. Right now I am assuming that it may have started thawing when we lost power a couple weeks ago, but I'm scared of it! LOL

If your scared of it toss it in a 350 degF oven for an hour. That will sterilize all the exposed part...

I have a cooked ham that was in our fridge when it went down saturday night. It has been sitting on top of the stove wrapped in a plastic bag until this morning and I have been pigging out on it......LOL

I'd say if you're scared of it, toss it. Sad, yes, but your comfort is worth more than a ham. If you do eat it and get an upset stomach, you won't know if the ham was bad, ate too much or caught something from the store.

Spiral hams have more surface area than a regular ham so they're similar in concept to ground meat. Much more surface area to gather bacteria.

With it cooked, it'd be similar to having it in the refrigerator for a couple weeks. I guess another option could be to cut off and toss the outside portions that were thawed, but again, for your own peace of mind, you might just want to write it off.

As a side note a good tip I heard years ago was to keep a plastic bag with some ice cubes in it in the freezer. If power goes out when you're gone, one look at the cubes will tell you if it got warm in there. Melted cubes will be obvious. I told my cousin about it and he started doing that at his lake place. Made him feel much better because they would lose power out there often and he was nervous about leaving things.

Why not toss it in a wooded area and let some hungry animal eat it - it's so wasteful to just toss it in the garbage can.

when in doubt, dump...it's not worth the dr bill which is a lot more than the ham!

Yeah, I'm not cooking that ham and might talk to DH about if it's a good idea to toss it in the woods for the animals.

Thanks lazypup. My mouth has been watering for BBQ ribs all day! LOL

If you have woods around there, give it to the wild animals. They eat rotted stuff all the time so this would be a treat to them and they'd be glad to get it. I didn't think about being in a rural area. Great idea.

When in doubt, throw it out. I had food poisoning once in my life. Never again.

I seem to be the only one who believes that the outside edges of a spiral cut ham would begin to thaw in a pretty short time.

since you're worried about the freezer, I know that you will put a good thermometer in there to test it. If it's a big freezer, test it in various locations.