Death row meal!

If Andy were ever on death row, he says his last meal would be corned beef and cabbage. I think mine would be some sort of extravagant seafood bonanza, with a whole steamed lobster and fried clams and scallops (ideally, from The Red Barn in Maine) and french fries and corn-on-the-cob, except that I always cut off the kernels because they get stuck in my teeth. And a green salad, which I probably wouldn't eat because I'd be saving room for the lobster and clams and scallops. And a Coke (NOT DIET SO HELP ME) and also a good lager beer. And chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream. And now I'm really hungry.

Yesterday our CSA share included both cabbage and potatoes, which are two of the four ingredients necessary for Andy's favorite dinner - the other two, of course, are corned beef itself and carrots. I pulled a big hunk of corned beef out of the freezer to defrost, and will have to grab carrots from Wegmans later, when I stop to get beer, because drinking anything else with that meal will be silly. Oh, and here's a fun thing: turns out that putting corned beef in a Crock-Pot on low for nine hours is just about the perfect way to cook it. We like the vegetables to still taste like vegetables, so we don't cook them together, so I'll just cook that shit up separately when I get home, and we will eat like convicted inmates, or something.

You all might as well know now that I seriously love corned beef. It was the last meat I ate before I became a vegetarian twelve years ago, and it was one of the first I ate (after my body was used to animal protein again, so I didn't get sick) when I started eating meat again two years ago. It remains the only meat I will ever "snitch" - like, I'll open the door to the fridge to get some cider, or whatever, and, oh, while I'm in here, might as well grab a bite of corned beef. Oh, what's that, honey? Want me to grab you something from the kitchen? Sure. While I'm in here, I'm going to stand in front of the open fridge and eat a chunk of this stuff with my hands. It is the only meal I cook where I will fight Andy for the last bite. We buy slabs of it at Sam's when they're cheap and keep one in the freezer for corned-beef emergencies. It makes me happy that it's one of Andy's favorite things, because then I have an excuse to cook it more often, and still seem magnanimous and caring and wifely instead of gluttonous. This paragraph isn't going anywhere. It's basically just a love letter to corned beef. Dang, I'm pumped for tomorrow.

Only sort of related, but interesting: final meal requests from Texas's department of corrections, updated through 2003. Made me hungry and also slightly sick to my stomach at the same time.

What would your death-row meal be? Be creative!