Please excuse the lousy photograph – but if you could smell it all would be forgiven.

I prepared a brine to make corned beef last night and this is what it looked like this morning.  This is my first attempt at making it but by all of the accounts that I’ve read it is ridiculously easy to do and gives spectacular results.  We shall see.  The brine smells so wonderful with its assortment of spices – allspice, peppercorns, red pepper, mace, mustard seed, bay, mace, ginger, cloves, cinnamon and garlic.  It’s mixed with a gallon of water, 2 cups of salt, a little pink salt and sugar.  I simmered it last night and refrigerated it until this morning.

I have a large brisket of Heath beef that I submerged into the brine this morning.  I put a plate on top of it to make sure the meat stayed under the brine and put it back into the refrigerator.  I’ll check it every so often until next Wednesday morning when I will take it out and wrap it up in anticipation of St. Patty’s day on Sunday.  Looking forward to something that should look like this.

Yummmm.

The recipe can be found here.