Birth Announcement

it's a cow!

When I was born, I weighed 7 pounds and 4 ounces.  

Within those 7 pounds and 4 ounces was a heart, a brain, a nose, unbridled optimism, and long eyelashes. 

26 years later, I weigh more than that, because my body needed to make room for pessimism, self-doubt, a sense of humor, and longer eyelashes. 26 years later, I work in an office building in Soho so I can save the world.

Every year my work has a potluck. A potluck is a day where everyone can pinpoint exactly why their stomachs hurt. Every year there is a competition element, and this year’s competition item was brisket. 6 people were to make a brisket and bring it in to be judged by a jury of their peers.

Through a series of random events, I found myself, Katniss Everdeen style, volunteering to make one of the briskets. Is a cooking competition an apt comparison to a fight to the death? Sure. 

I’ve never made a brisket before. I honestly never cook meat. But if this is one of the key struggle foods of my people, I figured it can’t be that hard.

Most of the cooking time for a brisket is idle. Prep takes about 20 minutes and then you’re just waiting 4ish hours for the meat to cook and “render.” That’s an amazing word I learned from The Food Network that just means “melt.” It’s sexy though. The snow isn’t melting, it is rendering. God it’s hot out, are you rendering? Anyway.

The recipe we used was from my coworker’s grandma, cut out from the Miami Herald newspaper and taped to an index card. I translated it from Spanish before we could begin. Before you ask why I didn’t use my grandma’s recipe, it’s because it calls for a lot of prunes and I could not be the one responsible for bringing a laxative to the company potluck. Maybe next year, when I’m not so new.

We minced garlic, chopped onions, sliced carrots, and eye-balled a bunch of spices and olive oil. Bouillon added for more flavor and Heinz ketchup added for fun. 

We did not place. The winning brisket was smoked in a Big Green Egg upstate for 12 hours and transferred to the city in butcher paper. We probably didn’t stand a chance. I learned that I’m more competitive than I thought, and I learned that you should probably not enter a cooking competition for a dish you’ve never made, if you’re more competitive than you thought. Regardless, the potluck happened, the brisket was eaten, and my ego will recover.

But I forgot to tell you about the most harrowing moment of this process— I had to take the brisket out of the butcher paper and trim the fat. I picked up the slab of meat in my hands. 7 pounds and 4 ounces. A piece of meat full of potential, ready to take on the flavors that would complement it. A piece of meat that doesn’t know how it got to a walk-up in Brooklyn, but will soon nourish some people in the advertising industry. Raw meat is just potential. And potential is kind of disgusting. It’s intimidating. Potential was so overwhelming that when I picked it up and held it in my hands, I gagged. Potential is scary and can make you not even want to attempt to cook a brisket in the first place. But you should, because it might turn out just fine. And nobody will really notice if it’s bad— there’s a whole table of pies.