Jiggs Dinner Year Round

Every year at the end of our Christmas day meal of Corned Beef and New England vegetables we and the rest of the Hess family look at each other and ask why it is that corned beef isn't a more standard meal throughout the year?

As it sits in the slowcooker for 5-6 hours, the house comes to smell a bit otherworldly and the meat, when done, is by far the most tender – almost to the point of being a compact gelatin – of any meat we've ever tried.  Find a good 3-4 l.b. brisket and drop into the slow cooker, fat side up, along with sliced onions, six cloves, orange zest, a bay leaf, and the seed packet that comes standard with each meat package, and within two hours the house begins to smell like the dream of an Irish farmhouse kitchen, with the deeply salted meat commingling (sorry, English-major type) with a sharp under aroma of citrus.  This is only the beginning.  The brisket comes out of the slow cooker so delicate that it barely holds together held on a fork, and then you set it on a pan, spread a layer of dijon mustard and brown sugar over it, and bake. The topping becomes something of a sweet but tangy pudding. Sweet, salty, rich meat that eats something like a dessert. Surrounded with cabbage, carrots and potatoes boiled in the remaining meat liquid and you have a holiday dish that might only be rivaled by a perfect prime rib roast.  Ham, turkey?  Not even close.  Jiggs, from the old popular cartoon Bringing Up Father, like most of the rest of us who have sampled, apparently couldn't pass up a corned beef and cabbage meal, harkening back to his own old world Irish heritage.  The cartoon popularized the meal in America to the point that corn beef and cabbage was often referred to as a 'Jiggs Dinner.'  A Jiggs Dinner year round sounds like a good idea.