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Planning for Passover

My corned beef and cabbage dinner turned out better than I had expected, mostly because I actually liked the corned beef.

It was going to be a quiet dinner with just me and my friends, Katrina and Mike Fitzgerald. Then I got a call from my cousins from San Diego. They wanted to know if we might get together for dinner Saturday or breakfast Sunday. I assumed they would be with their son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter in Wallingford before they went to New York City for a week. But it turned out that it would just be them and a daughter, since the Wallingford kids would be in Boston for the weekend. Why, I asked, don’t you just stay at my house, have dinner here, stay overnight and get the train to in New Haven the next morning? They arrived around noon, and I fed them lunch and made them watch the UConn women’s game I’d DVRed. They were kind enough to pay attention, although the game went UConn’s way, 140 to St. Francis’s 56 points.

In any case, I did the corned beef, potatoes, onions, and carrots in my slow cooker part of my Instant Pot, taking the beef out after four hours and adding the cabbage just an hour before dinner. The soda bread was very good; I used dried unsweetened cranberries and added finely diced candied ginger. Then we finished an upside-down pineapple cake with ice cream I bought from Big Y that now sells ice cream from Wildowsky Dairy in Lisbon (Connecticut).

The next holiday is Passover. No one has invited me, so I will make myself either a fresh brisket or maybe a ham recipe from this month’s Fine Cooking. There are two other recipes in this issue, one for making burrata at home and a side dish called creamed potatoes and spring onions. This may be an issue you want to own.

Editor's note: An earlier version of this column contained a recipe for ham that, due to its inclusion in a column about Passover, several readers found disrespectful of their religious beliefs.