It's Grill Time

     The temperature has been warming up and this past weekend, the weather suited running the grill.  Friday, our neighborhood grocery had nice corned beef brisket* at prices that were not dire and I bought the largest one my checking account and oval grill pan would support.

     Saturday, it went in the covered pan, fat side up on the roasting rack with a turnip cut into large chunks (and another one would not have been remiss) at an hour per pan, to be joined an hour into the process by potato sections, a cut-up white onion, celery and carrots.  I put the seasoning that comes with corned beef on it, smoked paprika on the turnip and some rosemary-and-friends on the potato.  Without any added liquid, it ends up with a cup and a half of broth, the turnip mushy and loaded with salt -- a little bit on the potato chunks is better than butter.

     There was enough left over to save some corned beef back for homemade hash Sunday morning (mine with scrambled egg, Tam's the plain meat and potatoes) and freeze a bag of fat-separated broth, meat and vegetables for soup later.

     That would have been the weekend's adventures, except--  Our corner store also stocks some imported South American beef.  It's pre-packaged, and more affordable than their fancy butcher-cut meat.  Tam was celebrating the arrival of a check† when she noticed nice picanha steaks in that case.  Nice, and huge; she bought one and it was plenty.  Sunday was even warmer than Saturday, and the beef got seared and slow-grilled, rare for her, medium for me.  The fat cap renders as it cooks and melts into the meat -- and, very briefly, onto the coals and flares up, when I turned my half sideways to brown the cut end!  That's when a covered grill comes in handy: close the vents until the flames stop, lift the lid, turn the meat and open the vents back up, smooth as silk.  It came out fine.  Add a bagged salad and some 1-minute nuked bone broth rice, and it was about as simple a fancy meal as could be had.
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* Presumably for Saint Patrick's day, despite the fact that the actual Irish are more likely to be eating ham.  Oh, they won't stock corned beef for New Year's, but the incorrect pinkish meat for a religious holiday turned cultural and now an informal and widely-observed secular holiday, suddenly they can't get enough.  Oh well, corned beef is corned beef.  I won't pass it up.
 
† While the average income for writers is decent money (a tad under $50K for fiction novelists), they get that figure by throwing Steven King, Dan Brown, Suzanne Collins and so on in with the regular working stiffs making three cents a word: a few dozen millionaires skews the number way up. Most writers get paid on publication -- or months later, once the check has creaked through the Byzantine financial operations the typical publisher applies to any sap whose name doesn't guarantee best-sellers. So the arrival of a check is indeed cause for celebration, and if two show up in any given week, well, it's a Jubilee.