THAT day again

This is the 'calm before the storm' and 'once more into the breech.' I missed todays celebration of Bach's birthday downtown at the marvelous Union station. They have a succession of recitals from choral to a magnificient organist while offering free coffee.
Tommorow is that green day. Everybody puts on really bad affectations of the gaelic accent- and, as Miles na Gopaleen wrote the finest recording of pure gaelic by a linguist was actually pigs grunting outside a pub selling potcheen after hours. People I smile at any other day are wearing orange and give me grim presbyterian looks. I have to wear green in honor of the tuatha du danu and this year will wear a green keffira just to mess with people besides orangemen.
But it's such a grim prospect. My mother dutifully buys a damned corned beef with cabbage and potatos every year. I hate corned beef. It looks like an unfrozen wooly mammoth carcass and tastes like roadkill boiled on a desert highway. I get offers of guinness served to cold or Jamesons when I prefer Lagavulin.
What I really want? A nice kosher pastrami on rye from the local kosher deli and a mexican beer, except Moshe would probably freak at the keffira.

Hey, I like corned beef.

Mexican beer eh? Dos Equis perhaps?

Are you English or something

Drivers license says California and Passport USA. My people came from Ireland ( Artilleryman of the Autro Hungarian empire/San Patricio brigade and I.R.A. each side) England ( Southampton and Cambridge each side ) Frisia ( except great grandfather was found half dead in a ship's boat in the mill pond of my maternal greatgrandmother and his background was kept secret) Germany which produced my grandmother's cousin Chuck Yeager who she said 'never amounted to much' and a veteran of the cruiser Emden who dodged T.E. Lawrence getting back and kept going to a California ranch paternally. There was a Choctaw and White Mountain Apache on both sides and finally my aunt Yola Gertz who survived
Bergen-Belsen only to be shot by polish Irgun in Palestine and came here. I tried mixing it up more asking my persian GF to marry me but she turned me down. Mygreat grandmother Hanna taught me gaelic and republican history and tommorow all these wee strands of green DNA elbow the others aside and scream NAMES KAVANAUGH ! UP THE REBELS! and consume road kill corned beef and cabbage.

I love corned beef, and pastrami is just corned beef with spices. I know because I make my own CB and pastrami, both the red "jewish" corned beef and the grey brine cured "irish" type. Both are delicious. One tastes of chemicals, the other is far meatier tasting and gets rave reviews when I make it since it's not the "normal" CB. Dang! I'm salivating!

The easiest way to make pastrami at home is to take CB, spice it up and wrap to let the spices get into the meat. Then smoke/cook it. Maybe a short time in a pressure cooker if further tenderizing is required. I've never needed the last step. It's thin sliced awesomeness piled on rye with some mustard! Don't forget the garlic pickle! Still salivating. Pavlovs dogs have nothing on me.