Barbequed Brisket

This recipe is from the New York Times, and is a good reason not to be a vegetarian. Make sure the brisket has some fat thereon. You'll chill it and take it all off later.
Here's a link to the web site:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/dining/213mrex.html?pagewanted=print

I browned and cooked the meat in a broiler pan that was about 2.5 inches high. It's hard to turn the meat (used turkey lifters), so be careful. I covered it with 2 layers of heavy duty foil. You want to cook it leaving enough time to cool it so you can remove the solid fat (beaucoup) from the sauce). This normally means cooking it one day early.

The recipe text (not included on the web site) mentions not buying two 2.5 pounds instead of one 5 pound. One other thing. This time of year (high summer) many supermarket don't have big briskets, or if so, they are frozen, so you need to allow for defrost time.

Obviously, not something to make spur of the moment. :)

The stuffed mushrooms as appetizer were from the 1976 Gourmet magazine and were something special, although I greatly cut down the amount of butter. They were something of a pain in the ass to make, because in those days Gourmet gave no quarter. But zowie, were they tasty.

I now have 57 pages, count 'em, in my new manuscript, tentatively title, In Flight. Currently I am researching money laundering and banking in the Cayman Islands, and hoping no one is monitoring my Internet searches, as they might get the wrong idea. Once I researched gambling and got SPAM from the gambling sites for years. I researched moonshine stills in the hills of Georgia for a short story, and pimps for another story.

The moral here is that a writer's searches may encompass lots of weird and even illegal stuff. Oh yes, and the transgender research for Festival Madness. The devil is in the details and so it the believability and yea, the writer's authority.

I roamed far from the brisket, another writerly trait that needs reining in. Sometimes.


Grrrrapeshot

Please Mr. Landscape Gardener, Make Me A vegetable Garden

Back in the day, if you wanted to grow veggies, all you needed was some vacant land, maybe a corner of the back yard, sun, access to water, usually a hose, something to till the soil, and seeds or seedlings and the sweat of your brow.

Now, all this can be yours by hiring someone to do it. You may pay $10,000 and up, but hey, it's only money. Today's newspaper, and sorry, but I can't recall if it was the WSJ or the Times had an article on wealthy folks hiring others to create their vegetable gardens and even raise their vegetables.

I wonder if these people's kids have whipping boys. Ooops! No one whips kids anymore, or at least not the kind of people who hire other people to grow their vegetables Are these the same folks who have quilting rooms and underwater sound systems for their swimming pools?

Seems to me that our government needs to raise taxes for some. They obviously have to much idle cash. Another article, maybe in the Times, listed the woes of those who have second homes and how hard it is to keep track of what's where, and the perils of leaving the computer, cell phone, mayonnaise, well, you name it at the other place. Ahhhhh. Woe is I!

Haven't any of these people ever heard of making a list? Oh, cripes, I forgot. They hire others to make their lists for them. Yeah, we all forget stuff. S.O. once packed for a weekend in Nantucket and forget his swim trunks. It happens. That's why god gave us stores. But I just can't feel too sympathetic. Yanno?

Off to make a crust to tomorrow's tart. I made the brisket with long, slow cooking in the oven, and a red pepper-feta dip for one of the appetizers. . Tomorrow I fill the tart shell with fresh berries and farmer cheese and whip up some stuffed mushrooms and fresh corn on the cob and we nip over to Bertucci's and pick up some brick oven rolls. Except for the rolls, I'm doing the cooking myself, not hiring it out, if you know what I mean. If we're lucky, there will be some cherry tomatoes that we grew ourselves. We did pay a family member to construct the planter boxes a few years ago. We have one for flowers and one for veggies. The heirloom beets look good. Tomatoes are awesome. And I did it myself.

Grapeshot