The Wearin' o' the Reddish Brown

Little Jack's Dad and Little Jack's Mom really know how to throw a party. Their plan is simple: invite everybody you know, plus everybody in the neighborhood, plus all your brothers, sisters, your in-laws and their parents, plus grandparents, children and all the friends who go school with anyone else's children, at St. Cecilia's or St. Ignatius or St. Matilda's or Holy Mother of Sacred Beef of Corn. People pour in and out of their house all day and all night like beer from the tap, and, incidentally, there's a ton of that too.



This is Little Jack's Dad. He is the bbq chef, and he doesn't do anything in a small way. Yesterday he only bbq'd 80 pounds of corned beef. Yes, 80 pounds, and it's the famous corned beef, the recipe Plotnik stole after the first time he tasted it, the one where you boil the corned beef in Guinness and then finish it on the bbq with a dijon/honey/brown sugar glaze. Gawrshallmighty.

This means Plot and Duck were blessed to eat two St. Pat's corned beef dinners this year, the first scrumptious one at Silent Bill and Mush's and the second at Little Jack's Dad and Little Jack's Mom's house.



This is Little Jack's Mom. She is your Basic Green, Irish to the leprechaun core. She has 15 brothers and 24 sisters, or maybe more, and they all live within half a block of each other. They all seem like really nice people too. Actually, Plot and Duck know that's true because they've been blessed for years to be invited to various parties or camping trips with the Lucases and Monaghans, mostly Monaghans.



This is the corned beef. Reddish brown and ridiculously, idiotically, perhaps criminally delicious.



This is the Irish Soda Bread. No pictures of the potatoes, the cabbage, the carrots, the salads, the appetizers, the cream puffs or the little shamrock cookies.



This is Little Jack's Dad with his brother Little Jack's Uncle. The intersting part here is that Uncle Jim, on the right, used to work with Plotnik at On Line for Idiots, and it was he who introduced the Plotniks to their contractor, his brother, and the rest is history.

How many of you have used a contractor you ever wanted to see again after the job was finished? Only the Plotniks. Little Jack's Dad is a fine contractor but damn, can he cook.



But let's be honest. Plotnik let everyone down. Unless they're kidding: when he was invited to the party he was asked to bring his accordion. Naturally, he figured that they were joking, that like all his other friends nobody ever really wants to hear the accordion, that he would walk in the door with his accordion strapped on and people would start to hoot and haw. Wrong. He has now promised on the Sacred Reddish Brown that he will never, ever, come to another party at Jack's house without bringing his accordion...unless they really are still kidding.