Recipe #4: Sherry’s Easy Brisket

Finally, some real food. Quasi-Libertarians do not live by dessert alone, and the rest of us shouldn’t either.

What else could it be but an entrée? One made from a big hunk of beef, and you can’t get more stereotypically American than that.

You also can’t get more American than the convenience that is at the heart of this recipe. The soup mix and salad dressing manufacturers of this world did all the preparing and combining of the flavorings, so you don’t have to!

Somebody said it would be easy

Not that I’m complaining. I’m not above convenience cooking. I’m all for anything that makes preparations for cooking a three-and-a-half-pound chunk of meat easier.

So easy it was, to combine all the pre-prepared flavorings and pour them over the uncooked meat,

Red and raw

and then put the whole covered deal into a 250° oven to cook for hours on end.

Later that day

I actually like this pace of cooking, getting something going and forgetting about it for three or four hours. It turns out that this is best for cooking brisket – “low and slow” is the term – but I perhaps could have left it to cook longer, as the meat didn’t come out as tender as brisket should be.

Edible, though

Or so I was told. Remember, I’m a vegetarian, so this dish wouldn’t have appealed to me anyway. But the rest of my family loved it, fairly gobbled it about all up. The flavor was reported to have been very, very good (in fact my wife has been beseeching me to make this again), and I’m willing to give the recipe the benefit of the doubt and take personal blame for the less-than-ideal texture of the meat. If even a vegetarian of near thirty years standing can make this dish come out compelling enough, well, it must be easy indeed.

Lesson learned: Big chunks of meat are not as revolting if you don’t think about them so much

Rating: Nine out of ten dead animals