I love corned beef, so bear with me.

The way I grew up eating corned beef was once a year, boiled until tender. The fattier the better, because this basic, common preparation can make the meat a little dry and stringy. (I still make fun of myself for accidentally throwing half an iceberg lettuce instead of a half a green cabbage in the pot, and yelling to my mom, “There’s something wrong with this cabbage, it’s disintegrating!”)

When I made my own corned beef for the first time, in grad school—my first time having a real kitchen away from home—I tried it in the Crock Pot with a little garlic and black pepper. And that was great! Softer and more tender than the boiled method, and basically no work. Like a 1950s housewife, I’d switch the Crock Pot on low in the morning and have dinner when I came back. Back then, before COVID and inflation, corned beef went on sale around St. Patrick’s Day for as low as $1.69 per pound, no limit or digital coupon. It was in grad school that I first started buying four or five of them and throwing them in the slow cooker when I wanted meat.

At some point, I came up with a way to make corned beef a little more like roast beef. I started soaking the corned beef to reduce the salt, roasting it in the oven in some foil with a little liquid, and then finishing it in a hot oven (with or without a honey mustard glaze).

This year, for the second year in a row, we bought a Wegmans brand corned beef, which is more expensive and higher quality than those probably loss-leader specials from Cook’s or O’Brien’s. And I wanted to do something new and interesting with it.

I’ve recently gotten interested in trying out smoking, as cheaply and simply as possible, with my gas grill. The most basic way to do this is to buy a small-ish bag of wood chips, throw 1-3 cups of them in a foil pouch, leave it slightly open or poke a few holes in it, and nestle it under a burner. I turn on only one burner, put the meat on the opposite side, and leave it for 1-3 hours. This isn’t really true smoking, but it gives a hint of smoke flavor.

So what I did this St. Patrick’s Day was make homemade “semi-pastrami”: I rinsed the corned beef, rubbed it with included spices plus garlic powder and black pepper, “smoked” it for three hours, and then steamed it on the stovetop till tender. Steaming is apparently how the old-school New York delis do it; it’s supposed to make it very soft, but not kind of sapped of flavor the way boiling can do. (If corned beef is too salty for you, a one- or two-hour soak in water is a good thing to do before cooking it any of these ways.)

After the smoking:

And served:

Next time I’m using a fattier point cut corned beef. But…yes. One of the problems with this preparation is going back to not doing it this way!

This piece is really about remote work, because St. Patrick’s Day was a Monday. I remember the early days of the pandemic (I had been working mostly from home before that, but the pandemic really made it final, and unchosen), and the feeling of curiosity and potential I had with all this unlocked time. I’d make these nice lunches for us, go for long walks, stay up late writing or wake up extra early. The sense that the available time had opened up and that things could be done with it was very keen. And I not only kept up with all my work, but did the same work faster, or did more in the same time.

That has remained true, but what’s harder to keep is that feeling of limitless possibility. Your day always ends up taking a shape of some sort. Things you want to routinize splay out and never really get wrangled; that in turn makes it harder to feel like the time you do have can actually be used for anything.

But of course, it can. Attempting my first pastrami on a plain old weekday is cool. Going out for an impromptu lunch is fun. Setting aside time to walk or read or go play with the cats or catch up on a bit of garden work—all of that is totally possible with no time taken away from work. But reminding yourself that free weekday time is okay to use for this kind of thing is a skill. Sometimes it’s easier to do the “I might not be getting anything done, but at least I’m not having fun” thing.

In some ways this is the biggest challenge of having a totally remote work situation, five-plus years on. Not that life takes over work or that work takes over life. Not even having too little face-to-face time with people, though I do try to remedy that. But it’s more just that being at home becomes the default, and it becomes a kind of work to remind yourself that the day can take any direction. Grilling on a Monday is a good way to bring that back into focus.

For others who are still young-ish and have been remote working or been self-employed for awhile, what do you do with that unlocked time? Is the urbanist dream that people will reinvigorate their local neighborhoods because they’re around more true? Or does working from home tend to draw us inward? How do you balance enhancing your home life with not in-sourcing too much and feeling like leaving the house is a waste of time or money instead of a little bit of delight and serendipity?

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