Homemade Irish Corned Beef and Vegetables

For Christmas of 2007, my then-boyfriend's brother (now brother-in-law!) gifted us with a year's subscription to Bon Appetit. Oh, glory days! I poured over every month's magazine, ear-marked recipes that I swore that I'd make omg right now, and then promptly forgot about most of them. If you are a self-prescribed serial recipe collector (ahem, like me) you know how that goes.

Despite turning down my husband's offer to continue the Bon Appetit subscription, my recipe pile, whether gathered from online sources or other cookbooks, continued to grow. And grow. So, I've stopped buying cookbooks. I haven't stopped gathering recipes from online sources, but oh well. We all regress. But what I have done is pledge to go through each of my Bon Appetit magazines for that corresponding month, and work my way through the recipes.

In Bon Appetit's March of 2008 edition, they featured an article on brining and corning your own corned beef. I thought that was the perfect excuse to have people over and throw an Irish party*, even though most of us (ok, all of us) aren't even Irish or of Irish descent. Ah, details. Whatever. It was glorious! I made the Guiness mustard and the horseradish cream, and friends brought over rye bread, cheesecake, and wine. Oh, yeah, and beer, but barely anyone touched that. See, what did I tell you? We're not Irish.

Go here for the recipe. I followed it exactly, except I had no star anise for the bouquet garni, and honestly, I don't think anyone missed it.

*Is it bad that I invite people over so that I can have a great excuse to cook?