“Got any special plans for Father’s Day?” the cashier asked us, as she rang up our groceries.

“Just cooking that corned beef,” I replied, pointing to the brisket in her hand.

To be honest, I’d planned on cooking it long before I realized today was Father’s Day. It’s a Sunday, and Sundays are for cooking some sort of roast. I do so not because we eat a big traditional midday meal on Sundays. Rather a roast means leftovers, and I can start the week knowing that there will be something to pack for lunch on Monday, something to transform into subsequent meals as well.

The only problem, of course, is that I really don’t love roasts. Or to be a bit more accurate, I don’t much like roast beef. Or to be more accurate again, I didn’t much like roasts when I was growing up. But now that I’m an adult, now that I’m more interested in cooking and in eating, I’m getting better at preparing this meal.

I didn’t really like many of the roasts my mother would cook for us, although I’d sometimes enjoy the leftovers – that is, until they dragged on into the third or fourth day and I started to question if it was time for a curry because she’d exhausted all other ideas or if, in some sort of British imperialist awfulness, curry was something I associated with meats that had gone a bit gray.

I definitely did not like roast corned beef when I was growing up, always wishing we could just cut out the middle meal and go straight to the corned beef hash (which I later learned my grandmother would make from a can, not from a piece of beef that she’d brined and baked). I think my father had told me some sordid story about corned beef being rotting meat preserved with salt, and I couldn’t get the taste of rot out of my mind.

I did not like any of the meats that would appear from the crockpot where my mother would cook her corned beef – ham, short ribs, beef goulash, corned beef, all yuck. These were all less delicious cuts of meat, I knew as the butcher’s granddaughter, that needed to be cooked “low and slow” in order to tenderize them. They also tended to have large chunks of fat – truly the most disgusting part of any meaty meal and the part I’d have to sit and stare at, uneaten on my plate, before I could be excused from the kitchen table.

I can be excused from the table any goddamn time I want now. I can leave a big chunk of gristle or tough piece of meat on my plate. I can cook a roast with the leftovers in mind. I’m having corned beef hash for breakfast tomorrow, that’s for sure.