Late last week I remembered that St. Patrick’s Day was coming up and that’s a corned beef holiday. So I started looking for some corned beef.

I quickly learned there’s a corned meat factory here in San Francisco, Roberts Corned Meats. I got a five pounder.

I kept insisting that preparing corned beef was so simple because you just boil it, but Mark pushed me to be more creative than that. After some research (primarily this article, as well as the headnote in this recipe), I decided to braise the corned beef in the oven.

First I brought the corned beef to a boil in a pot of water, to try to remove some of the saltiness. Then I put the meat, fat side up, in a roasting pan with four crushed garlic cloves and added some of the boiling water and tap water to cover about 1/4 of the meat (this was too much). I coated the top of the beef with a mix of brown sugar and pickling spices (based on this recipe), covered tightly with foil, and baked at 300F for about 2 hours. About halfway through I added a few potatoes, carrots and half an onion. When the beef was done, I transferred it to a cookie sheet and broiled it for a few minutes.

We ate this with soda bread (dairy-free) and braised collards and kale. The soda bread is based on this recipe, but I used soy milk soured with vinegar in place of buttermilk. I also didn’t turn the bread upside down during the baking process because that seemed crazy.

I started out just making collards, to represent our southern heritage along with Mark’s Irish heritage, and because it’s what we had on hand, but they got too salty when I decided to use some of the corned beef liquid to braise the greens. So I added some kale. It was still pretty salty, as was the beef, but pretty good. Good thing it’s a once a year kind of dish.