What's cooking this weekend?

Saturday began cloudy, cool, and rainy. A look at my calendar shows I've got plans for 3 days this week. That meant today was a perfect time to precook some foods for suppers. I loaded up the oven with :

a corned beef;
a fresh picnic pork roast;
some babyback ribs;
and a butternut squash.

The ribs and corned beef were in pans of water, the roast picnic in it's own dry pan, and the squash just fitted in where it fit. I'm glad my fan has a convection fan to circulate the air, because the oven was FULL.

Anyway, set the temp at 275, the timer for 3 hours and walked away. All day these luscious odors eminated from the kitchen. When the timer went off, the oven was turned off. I pulled the roast, wrapped in foil, and put it away; but let everything else cool with the oven.

So this week we can have:

pulled pork with bbq sauce;
creamy squash soup with a salad and sourdough bread;
Reuben sandwiches.
We had the ribs for supper on Saturday.

Now a hint I learned while working at a butcher shop (Oh yeah... I forgot that job last week. I also worked in a butcher shop). Most people take their corned beefs out of the packages, plop them in a dutch oven full of water, bring it to a boil and cook the bejesus outta their beef for 2.5 hours. Then complain that the meat is stringy and watery.

In our butcher shop we did this:

Place the package of the corned beef in a pan. DO NOT OPEN THE PACKAGE. Add water up tonear the top of the meat (not completely covering the beef, but up high on the sides). Then cook it. In the butcher shop, we would bring the oven up to 400 degrees, then turn it off and go home. It would cool down slowly, and the corned beefs would be done in the morning.

Cooking your corned beef this way leaves you with a firm piece of meat that is easy to cut. For a boiled dinner, you save the juices from the package (which usually open slightly while cooking it), and add that to your water/stock when cooking the veggies.

Anyway, my tip o the day... how to cook a tasty corned beef.