As a good Irish girl, once a year on St. Patrick's Day, I cook up a corned beef dinner with cabbage, potatoes, carrots...the works (although I don't color my beer green, but I don't think that they do that in Ireland).  This year I decided to make my own corned beef so a little over a week ago I bought a brisket from our local farmer and started the brining process.  The end result was okay...not great.  But, let's think about what the good that came from this experiment:

• It is a start from which I can do further experimentation...less salt in the brine, different spices, different cooking method.
• It was a totally local meal - even down to the horseradish root that was grown on a nearby farm and that I grated myself just in time for dinner. 
• Since the thought of industrial meat makes me sick these days, if I wanted corned beef, I had no other option than to make it myself.

As I take on making more of my own food from scratch I have to constantly remind myself of a couple of things:

• When I do something like make my own corned beef, I am NOT trying to imitate what the industrial food system has given us.  The reality is that the industrial food system is trying to imitate centuries of hand-crafted home-made artisan products in a way that is fast and cheap.  Think of a home brewer...sure, there is a learning curve, but that home brewer is doing what has been done through the ages...making homebrew.  Huge, commercial breweries are a relatively new way to make beer so that people can have beer at home (or out) without having to make it.
• Anything homemade is an artisan product - a one-off.  Making artisan products is not something that you do to perfection the first time.  Perfecting artisan products takes years of learning and trial and error.  Given the few number of times I will make corned beef, I may never perfect it to an art, but each year I can have fun trying.

So, with all of that in mind...maybe that conrned beef was better than OK.  Maybe is was great after all!