Sweet pickles

This is a bit of a catch-up post.

For St. Patrick's Day last week (biggest holiday of the year here in Butte), we decided to try home-corned beef instead of buying a pre-pickled brisket. Mainly because I had a beef roast in the freezer, and I had the pickling spice, and I had a recipe in this cookbook.

When Dr. G's grandparents - pillars of business and social life in this town from the 1940s to the 1960s or so - passed away several years ago, we received a couple barrels of just ... stuff. Some of it, we couldn't use. Some of it was treasure. This was treasure. Great historical recipes, with a few handwritten notes from Grandma.

Here's the corned beef recipe.



We didn't have any saltpeter. Have you ever tried to find that? Yeah, good luck. We went looking for some once, for a science experiment S wanted to do. Unfound.

Also, we didn't pickle our beef for 12 days. Kinda hard to imagine doing that, honestly. We just soaked it for one day. So maybe what we were making was just corned-flavor marinated beef. That's ok. Maybe better.

I had a great helper.

Here's how the beef looked while marinating. I don't provide a lot of gross-out pictures on this blog; this might be my first, actually.

And this is really disappointing: I didn't take pictures of the finished product. It also looked kind of sick; boiled meat is never going to win in the plate-appeal category. But it did taste yummy.

Happy belated St. Paddy's day from the St. Paddy's capital of the Western U.S. We had fun.