Perspective people; perspective.

Red corned beef, or gray? Mantle, or Mays? Beatles, or Stones? Chili, beans or no beans? Coke, or Pepsi? Weed, or Beer? Creationism, or Evolution? Democrats, or Republicans? Celtics, or Lakers? Red Sox, or Yankees? (Yankees suck) Baked, or mashed? Mozart, or Beethoven? Hockey, or boxing? Beer, or Coors Lite? O'Rielly or intelligence? Kerry, or a personality? Up, or down? Pedophilia, or Catholicism? Banks, or home owners? Sauce, or gravy? Rich, or poor? Bieber, or Cyrus? Men, or women? Obama, or an American? Bush, or a post? Cheney, or Satan? (no fair comparing the same thing). Argue much? It seems as a people we just love ourselves a good argument. We like to throw down over it too. If your team decides to crush working people as a matter of policy you better be on board even if you happen to be a working people. Yeah I'm talking to you Joe the plumber.

Fight, fight, fight, cry, cry, cry, work yourself into a lather, get ready to go to war... Then suddenly the Big Kahuna reminds us just what misery is really like. Japan is destroyed. Boom, gone. I heard a radio commentator say he had never seen such destruction before in his life time. I guess he forgot the earthquake in Haiti. I guess he forgot the tsunami that hit the Indian ocean. Really people? When we're not fighting over whether the banks, or Acorn crashed the economy do we really forget the lessons we should have learned just a year ago? What lesson? Just that getting in a huff over the color of the corned beef or the proper use of condiments is maybe a waste of time when 10s of thousands of people can be obliterated because nature got cranky.

The color of the meat is purely arbitrary.

So you want a good cut of corned beef. You pick the color. Red is fine, gray is fine, if they have blue go wild as long as you trust your market. (If you don't trust your market why is it your market?) Now me, I want a verity of root vegetables. Turnips, potatoes and carrots for sure. Celery root and parsnips? There's plenty of room in my pan. You want a head of cabbage.

Now they call it corned beef and cabbage. They also call it boiled dinner. No boiling, I repeat, no boiling. When you boil things you are immersing them in 212 degree water. Most things are over-cooked at 180 degrees. If you put all that stuff in an oven and raised its' internal temperature to 212 you would probably end up throwing it out. So why boil it? Because water is a better conductor of heat than air when you boil things, unless they are uniform in shape and you are going for speed, you have much less room between done and over done. Since the key to good food is cooking something until it is done we'll skip the boiling. The microwave is limited for the exact same reason.

1. Pull out a roasting pan. 
2. Take the beef and rub it all over with brown sugar.
3. Put the beef in the pan, dump in one beer (or a Coors lite if you don't have any beer), cover tightly with foil and place in a 300 degree oven.
4. Peel your root vegetables. Cut them into similar sized chunks.
5. After 1.5 hours pull the pan out of the oven, uncover and add the vegetables.
6. Herbs would be nice right here too. I'd go with dill, or thyme. Throw them in whole. Maybe some bay leaves. In fact if you don't have fresh skip this step completely.
7. It shouldn't be dry, but if if is add a cup of water. Duh!
8. Cut the cabbage into wedges. Go through the core at the bottom so the leaves stay attached to something. Loose leaves cook way too fast.
9. Another hour down? Add the cabbage and re-cover.
10. 20 minutes more. Let's eat!
11. I like to serve with malt vinegar and butter, Mmmm butter! 
12. If you want mustard hey, it's your stomach. Use catsup too for all I care.