This recipe comes because I bought a full beef brisket to make homemade pastrami.  Why am I making homemade pastrami?  Because I want to make my favorite sandwich and so far I haven’t been able to duplicate it.  It ‘s called the the Tiffany Fweef Salcini from the Laundry.  It’s simply pastrami, honey mustard, scallion cream cheese and jalapenos.  You’d think this would be easy to duplicate, but it was harder than I expected.  Deli pastrami doesn’t cut it and the honey mustard is sweet and kind of spicy.  The pastrami has to be homemade.  So I decided to try making it.  It’s actually not that hard.  You just need to wait for five days, then 3-4 hours after baking to get some.  I wasn’t going to make all 15 pounds into pastrami, so I decided to make something else with the remainder.

I found this recipe from MyRecipes called Zinfandel-Braised Beef Brisket with Onions and Potatoes. I wanted to do something a little bit different with it.  This reminds me of my favorite pot roast recipe.  I disagree a bit on the calorie calculation.  The original recipe states it at 342 calories.  My calculation comes out a bit higher.  I’m going to go with that because beef brisket is a pretty fatty piece of meat and I don’t want to underestimate the calories.  Here are the original stats according to my calculation.

• 623 Calories
• 39g Fat
• 103mg Cholesterol
• 730mg Sodium
• 1046mg Potassium
• 34g Carbohydrate
• 28g Protein
• 55% Vitamin A
• 31% Vitamin C
• 4% Calcium
• 21% Iron

Here’s what I changed in this recipe:

• I deleted the added salt.
• I deleted the tomato paste.
• I increased the servings from 8 to 18.
• I added one cup of lentils to stretch the protein.
• I replaced the red potato with butternut squash to increase the vitamin A.
• I deleted the olive oil to save calories
• I reduced the onions to two to save calories.
• I reduced the amount of zinfandel to one cup to save calories
• I reduced the amount of beef to 2 pounds.
• I added in Brussels sprouts to increase the vitamin C.

Here are the final stats:

• 304 Calories
• 16g Fat
• 41mg Cholesterol
• 76mg Sodium
• 725mg Potassium
• 29g Carbohydrate
• 18g Protein
• 126% Vitamin A
• 138% Vitamin C
• 4% Calcium
• 23% Iron

Here is the final recipe:

Zinfandel-Braised Beef Brisket with Onions and Butternut Squash

Serves 16

• 1 cup zinfandel or other fruity dry red wine
• 4 cup fat-free, less-sodium chicken broth
• 2 pounds beef brisket, trimmed
• 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, divided
• 2 sweet onions
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1 1/4 teaspoons dried thyme, divided
• 6 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
• 2 carrots, peeled and cut into (1/2-inch-thick) slices
• 2 celery stalks, cut into (1/2-inch-thick) slices
• 1 1/2 pounds butternut squash, cut into 1 inch cubes
• 2 cups brown lentils
• 3 pounds Brussels Sprouts
• 1 teaspoon dried oregano
• 1/4 teaspoon ground red pepper
• Chopped fresh parsley