The thrill of cooking and the agony of da feet

How it all started this morning

The inside of the cabbage looks like a tree

Well I started cooking my corned beef brisket this morning about 10 o'clock. It took me about 30 minutes to put the ingredients together in the crockpot, and another 30 minutes to clean everything up.



I looked at several recipes on the Internet on how to prepare corned beef in a crockpot and they were all pretty much the same except for minor things. I didn't have any bay leaves or thyme to put in it so I hope they weren't all that important.



I almost messed up right from the start because I just glanced at the recipes and didn't realize you're supposed to put the cabbage in after the brisket has cooked. But luckily I read the fine print before I started cooking everything, and had to take everything out of the pot to get to the cabbage that I had put in first. Speaking of cabbage, I didn't realize that if you slice a cabbage in half it looks like a tree inside, so I had to stop and take a picture of that.

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I need some smaller crockpot liners

Another problem I had is the crockpot liners I bought are way too big. I knew my crockpot was smaller than normal so I was looking for small crockpot liners but couldn't find any, so I bought the only size they had and I could've used them for a poncho.



The next problem I ran into is my crockpot is very very small and a 3 pound corned beef brisket appears to be very very big laying next to it. So I cut the brisket into three pieces, threw one in the pot and sealed up the other two with my Seal a Meal gadget, [ The first time I've used it ] and put them in the freezer.



Some recipes I looked at on the Internet said to cook the brisket on low for eight or nine hours, other recipes said cook it on high for five or six hours. I chose high because that sounded closer to dinner time to me.

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It doesn't look like much food for an all day project

Several of the recipes that I looked at called for adding a bottle of beer to the crockpot, and at first I figured that the alcohol in the beer would only increase the probability of an explosion later in the day. But looking at the crockpot and how full it was I could see it wasn't going to hold a full bottle. So I poured in half and drank the rest......



I wrote all of that this morning and now it's 6:30 in the evening and I've already eaten dinner . The brisket turned out pretty good, I cooked it for seven hours on high and that seem to be about the right amount of time because everything was done.



It looks like I can get two small meals out of what I cooked today, so the whole brisket should give me about six meals. The cooking part was easy enough but the preparation and the cleanup was kind of time-consuming. Maybe it gets to be easier when you know what you're doing but for me it seemed like my whole day revolved around that one meal.



Maybe by the time I finish cooking the other two pieces of the brisket I will be better at it and it won't be so time-consuming. But I have to admit it was kind of nice to have a home-cooked meal on a Sunday afternoon,...... if I just didn't have to wash so many dishes.



theboondork

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