Is home-smoked pastrami is a good post-ride food?

My cycling karma must be way off lately, either that or I’m just not paying attention. Two cycling incidents in as many weeks! Luckily they were the sort of incidents you can laugh about later while you’re having a beer with friends, rather than the sort of incident that breaks bikes and sometimes people into itty bitty pieces.

No offense to my local bike shop, but all the family bikes should be in fine working order right now, and guys, I’d rather see you out on the road or the trails than have to go to your shop YET AGAIN for something I shouldn’t have broken in the first place!

I feel a little better with that off my chest.

Now after all that, I did get out a bit this week, and I’d even planned another mountain bike ride for Saturday, when I was going to go ride Bartram Trail up by the lake with a coworker, and our families were going to meet us right afterwards for a picnic. How perfect is that?

Unfortunately the skies opened up after lunch on Friday, and the rain was still falling Saturday morning, so our plan was doomed. By the time the skies were clear, it was well in to the afternoon, and I was already too lazy to get on the bike, or even to make plans for a Sunday ride.

Instead I spent the day playing and reading, and also doing the minimal prep work for beef pastrami. I’d never thought about it before, but according to this and some other resources I read and couldn’t be bothered to save, pastrami is just meat that’s been corned and then smoked. Andrea recently picked up a corned beef brisket on sale at our supermarket, and I immediately thought of it and began drooling when I read those articles.

The hunk o’ beef is cooking away in our water smoker as I type this, internal temperature recently verified as 147 degrees fahrenheit on the way up to 165, when I’ll remove it to a warm environment to rest for an hour before slicing and eating it.

Luckily, my cycling malaise disappeared this morning, as when I awoke at around 6:45 from a very good night’s sleep, I KNEW I was going on a ride, and I even knew the route I wanted to take, which is a figure 8 made up of two other routes I sometimes ride during the weeks, so it’s a bit longer than I normally do. I haven’t received my GPS bicycle computer back from Garmin yet, so I don’t know exactly how far or how fast I went, but I rode for two hours and forty-nine minutes. My pace on solo rides like that varies between 15 and 17 miles per hour, so my distance was probably between 42 and 48 miles. Now I’m just waiting to find out if home-smoked pastrami makes a good post-ride meal!