The Things I Do...

I enjoy cooking for people, and I enjoy hosting small "get-togethers" at our house. I have two major flaws however: 1) I shoot big and regret it later and 2) I don't eat meat and have no clue what the food tastes like that I serve. Oh my.

Several weeks ago, I decided to have Jeremy's family (mom, dad, sister, bro-in-law, gma, gma) over for a Mother's Day lunch. This was going to be a present from "us" to them, and it was going to be super fun.

And then last Saturday, before the "Bachelor Hot-Tub Experience" I got the bee in my bonnet to make a brisket. So this is my brisketventure....

I did tons of research -- I learned the difference between a "Point-Cut" and a "Flat-Cut" - I learned to look for marbling and a fat cap -- I researched marinades. I was set.... until I went to the grocery store and got lost in the aisles of meat. Nothing said "Brisket" on it. Turns out, briskets are not big sellers (notice: foreshadowing). I was led to a side-cooler where the choices were all wrapped and frozen. The meat clerk told me this is the one that I wanted:

Since the meat clerk seemed to know about briskets (he mentioned "marbling") I took his word for it that the 4.3 lb of frozen brick-like meat would be satisfactory for my brisketparty.

Since it was frozen, I had to defrost it. All I can say is "HOLYSHIZ This is a huge piece of frozenness" and "This looks like a cadaver on an autopsy tray"

Here is my sous-chef. Since the brickmeat was so HUGE, I had to cut it in half to fit it into the crock-pot. It was supposed to marinade overnight in a freezer bag... however, there was not a chance in hades that this THING was going to fit in a bag. (Unless it was a body bag.) So I marinaded it in the crock-pot. Please note: My sous-chef was in charge of putting the spices in the bottom of the pot, and had no contact with the raw meat.

And here it is with the five-million spices we had to put on it. The Gerber Graduates were optional spices.

Then it came time to dump some apple cider on it. I had to dump some beer on it later.

And here's where the drama begins. The recipe said that this needed to cook for 10 hours, and the recipe was for 3 lbs of meat. I was cooking 4.3 lbs. I had important people arriving at 1pm. I had a previous Halloween Roast Incident where the crockpot cooked the meat at the speed of light and it turned out brick-like. I rationalized this out -- I have a new crock-pot cookbook. It HAS to have taken into account the faster cooking times of crockpots. I cannot risk a shorter cooking time and have people show up to a pot full of raw meat.

I woke up at 2am to turn the crock pot on and to add the additional liquid marinade.

I woke up at 8:15am (MY Mother's Day Gift) and it smelled like lunch-time. AH Shiz! Really?

This is what I found:

If you can't tell. It looked like 2 bricks in a pot full of fatty juices. I turned the crappot off and got ready for church. Brynn was singing this morning, so the whole family was attending. I spent the service brainstorming damage control methods (and taking turns with Jeremy walking around with Brandon).

So, when we got home, I sliced/shredded the brisket and sifted the marinade to get the chunks out (peppercorns, mustard seeds, etc) and then dumped the liquid over the meat. It went into the oven on LOW and I hoped that this would help the meat soak up the marinade and make it the tastiest thing ever.

This is what it looked like after damage-control:

And this is what it looked like when I served it to people. Yep, that's right. It had a "bland" flavor and additonal salt was needed. (If you can't tell, Jeremy is salting the entire pan of meat in this picture, as a favor to everybody else.)

I was going to take a "final" picture of the brisket sandwiches along side the beans that I also made, but at this point, it just felt like more unnecessary work.

And I refuse REFUSE to give anybody this recipe. Don't ask.