Cookin again

[Dannyalcatraz]

Right! You needed to make the dish for a party connected to the start of Lent or something?

Actually for St. Patrick’s Day in March. Which is still in Lent. I cook several pounds of the stuff every year these days because we give some to the neighbors, and they’ve already started commenting about how they’re looking forward to it.

So I started looking for it in stores to check prices…and found ZERO. Over 3-4 grocery runs.

Long story short, after years of cooking corned beef for my Mom in different ways*, I stumbled upon beer braising it. After 1 bite, Mom insisted that I try it. I did, and I’ve been eating mine ever since. Then I started making extra and freezing it for other times of the year.

Then we gave some to some of it to the neighbors, and now it’s a thing. IOW, I’m a victim of my own success!







* she loves it, I hate it

 

[prabe]

Actually for St. Patrick’s Day in March. Which is still in Lent. I cook several pounds of the stuff every year these days because we give some to the neighbors, and they’ve already started commenting about how they’re looking forward to it.

So I started looking for it in stores to check prices…and found ZERO. Over 3-4 grocery runs.

Long story short, after years of cooking corned beef for my Mom in different ways*, I stumbled upon beer braising it. After 1 bite, Mom insisted that I try it. I did, and I’ve been eating mine ever since. Then I started making extra and freezing it for other times of the year.

Then we gave some to some of it to the neighbors, and now it’s a thing. IOW, I’m a victim of my own success!







* she loves it, I hate it

Well, at least St. Patrick's Day would have given you more time to work out a recipe than, er, today; and that's a holiday I can associate with corned beef.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Well, at least St. Patrick's Day would have given you more time to work out a recipe than, er, today; and that's a holiday I can associate with corned beef.

The time pressure arose from the fact that it takes 7-10 days to brine a corned beef from scratch. That meant I was trying to reverse engineer/master a new process & recipe in 3 weeks for an audience with high expectations.

It’s one thing to try out a few different ways to bake tilapia- you can try a half dozen recipes in a day. But with a week’s delay built into the process?

And the odds of me getting it right the first time were not good.

 

[prabe]

The time pressure arose from the fact that it takes 7-10 days to brine a corned beef from scratch. That meant I was trying to reverse engineer/master a new process & recipe in 3 weeks for an audience with high expectations.

It’s one thing to try out a few different ways to bake tilapia- you can try a half dozen recipes in a day. But with a week’s delay built into the process?

And the odds of me getting it right the first time were not good.

Here it's just my wife and me, any recipe development we do is more a process of evolution than what you're describing. Or if we're setting out to try different ways to do a thing, we do them one at a time. Circumstance and all-a-that. (Usually we find a recipe that mostly suits us and evolve from that--which would not have worked for you, now.)

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Here it's just my wife and me, any recipe development we do is more a process of evolution than what you're describing. Or if we're setting out to try different ways to do a thing, we do them one at a time. Circumstance and all-a-that. (Usually we find a recipe that mostly suits us and evolve from that--which would not have worked for you, now.)

Normally, I’m just cooking for me & my parents, so it is a slower, more deliberate process. But when I started getting asked to do more and more cooking for big family/friend events and giving food as gifts, I had to really learn to standardize several of my recipes.

And this corned beef thing is a perfect storm of having a reputation to uphold, a recipe that takes a lot of time, a missing ingredient, and- if I’m honest- a bit of an overreaction on my part.