And to think I used to be a vegetarian.

And 13 years as a vegetarian. But thats for a different post. This one is about meat.

This is a photo record of my attempt to make salted beef and prastrami from scratch. This recipe is from Tim Hayward at the Guardian whose an awesome food writer. This is the spice mix.

And this is a load of salt. Well I guess you can't make salted beef without salt.

Wheres the beef? (I don't even know what that means, but now thanks to Graham in the comments section I do). And this is free range beef. None of that caged beef here;

And here is the water. What a pot of water it is. I should have rotated these photos before uploading them...

So I roasted and ground down the spices. Don't know if I was supposed to do that but its what I always do;

Then add to said pot of water boil and then wait for it to cool;

Smells like mulled wine and I'm tempted to taste it but I don't.

Now is where it got messy. It is supposed to be put in ziplock bags and put in the fridge. It was carnage in the kitchen with the brine going everywhere. So I put the meat in 2 containers and wrapped in cling film and left them out in the utility. It was also recommended to add prague powder but it was optional and sounds mental so I left it out. Its supposed to give the meat the pink colour so lets see what happens. The next stage is cooking it in 5 days time. Have to find wood chips for the smoking.

Update: 2 Days in and I'm flipping the beef every day as instructed. It smells amazing. These sure are some weird sentences I'm writing.