bone soup "recipe" [pb]
It was time tonight to make bone soup!*
While doing so, I checked the interwebs for bone soup recipes. It was horribly depressing. The ingredient lists all started with, "Purchase three ox bones and one ham bone from your butcher..."
No, no, no.
The correct ingredient list is:
All the bones from everything (cooked or uncooked); trimmed bits (fatty bits, gristly bits); one-mouthful-why-bother leftovers; carrot tops; turkey carcasses; woody parts of onions; tendons; potato peels and carrot peels and broccoli stems and turnip stems and leftover beet salad and the skin from roasted things; the last bit of soup broth in the pot; the deglazing goo from when you use wine to deglaze a pan and it makes delicious brown stuff but you don't have anything to do with it; leftover spice sachets that still have flavor in them; broth; wilted-but-not-rotten vegetables; a third of a hamburger patty... basically things, is the point I am trying to make here. Anything that's green or animal-derived or delicious or there and seems like it may have some flavor or vitamins or love left in it.
Me, I keep a giant gallon ziploc bag*** in the freezer. Every time I get a trash thing that might have some goodness left, I put/pour it into The Bag. When the bag is full, I fill a huge pot with some combination of wine and vinegar and water and sodium, put the frozen mass in it with some onion and garlic (or powdered garlic, or no onions or garlic), and boil it for many hours, adding liquid as needed. (The wine/vinegar are important for dissolving calcium out of the bones. Anything acidic, really.) After the aforementioned hours, I strain all the solids out, which is fine because they are gray and tasteless, having transferred their love to the broth - which is so full of calcium and so proteinaceous it sets when it cools, and contains all the tastiness that would otherwise have been discarded over the previous n months.
At this point it is an opaque liquid. For true bone soup, you add a bunch of soup parts, make soup, and eat it. While this is delicious, be warned that a single mouthful exceeds the USDA monthly allowance of comfort food. Alternatively, you can cook it down and freeze it in cubes, or whatever else you feel like because basically at this point you possess Broth++. I tend to shove it into a container in the fridge and add a spoonful to everything for two weeks, or use multiple spoonfuls as the base for delicious stews.
Note the lack of starting with purchase a thing. This is the difference.
* This was true when I started writing this post
** I am pretty sure the same thing would work without the animal parts, but it probably wouldn't gel, and wouldn't need vinegar?
*** Or several
While doing so, I checked the interwebs for bone soup recipes. It was horribly depressing. The ingredient lists all started with, "Purchase three ox bones and one ham bone from your butcher..."
No, no, no.
The correct ingredient list is:
All the bones from everything (cooked or uncooked); trimmed bits (fatty bits, gristly bits); one-mouthful-why-bother leftovers; carrot tops; turkey carcasses; woody parts of onions; tendons; potato peels and carrot peels and broccoli stems and turnip stems and leftover beet salad and the skin from roasted things; the last bit of soup broth in the pot; the deglazing goo from when you use wine to deglaze a pan and it makes delicious brown stuff but you don't have anything to do with it; leftover spice sachets that still have flavor in them; broth; wilted-but-not-rotten vegetables; a third of a hamburger patty... basically things, is the point I am trying to make here. Anything that's green or animal-derived or delicious or there and seems like it may have some flavor or vitamins or love left in it.
Me, I keep a giant gallon ziploc bag*** in the freezer. Every time I get a trash thing that might have some goodness left, I put/pour it into The Bag. When the bag is full, I fill a huge pot with some combination of wine and vinegar and water and sodium, put the frozen mass in it with some onion and garlic (or powdered garlic, or no onions or garlic), and boil it for many hours, adding liquid as needed. (The wine/vinegar are important for dissolving calcium out of the bones. Anything acidic, really.) After the aforementioned hours, I strain all the solids out, which is fine because they are gray and tasteless, having transferred their love to the broth - which is so full of calcium and so proteinaceous it sets when it cools, and contains all the tastiness that would otherwise have been discarded over the previous n months.
At this point it is an opaque liquid. For true bone soup, you add a bunch of soup parts, make soup, and eat it. While this is delicious, be warned that a single mouthful exceeds the USDA monthly allowance of comfort food. Alternatively, you can cook it down and freeze it in cubes, or whatever else you feel like because basically at this point you possess Broth++. I tend to shove it into a container in the fridge and add a spoonful to everything for two weeks, or use multiple spoonfuls as the base for delicious stews.
Note the lack of starting with purchase a thing. This is the difference.
* This was true when I started writing this post
** I am pretty sure the same thing would work without the animal parts, but it probably wouldn't gel, and wouldn't need vinegar?
*** Or several