The Marrow

Today was my first attempt at roasting marrow bones. My boyfriend brought home a bunch of five inch long bones and one long cut bone (five incher cut lengthwise in half). I followed the recipe that The Hungry Mouse had posted on her blog. Well, let's just say, I overestimated how much time I should let them roast (they were huge and for some reason I thought they would take as long as 40 minutes) and completely overcooked my first batch. They turned rock solid in the middle, yeah, no yummy fatty ooey gooey goodness was there to be had, so I then went on to roast the bone that he was able to have long cut, I roasted it in the oven on 450 degrees fahrenheit for ten minutes, this time the fat was mine, and they came out perfectly. I highly recommend either getting your bones trimmed down to around three inches, or getting them long cut, after making them long cut I find it is much easier to tell when they are done instead of having to guess if they are no longer pink in the middle, this way you can actually see. It wasn't a complete loss though, at least not for the dogs who got a delicious treat of overcooked marrow bones for a snack.

I served the bone marrow with toasted bread sliced from a french baguette, with roasted garlic, sea salt, cracked black pepper, lemon slices to squeeze over top, pan roasted cauliflower, and curly parsley. I will always recommend you use flat leaf parsley over curly since it has a lot more flavor, in my opinion, but, I live in a pretty rural area and all the stores had today was the curly. To say the least, the roasted bone marrow was smooth, buttery, meaty, and damned delicious. Next time I am going to try the parsley salad with capers and shallots to serve them with on top of the bread as long as the store gets some flat leaf parsley for me to use.

Since I am just like you, not rich, nor a chef, I have no fancy plates and I have a terribly unsteady hand so even though I use a pretty nice camera that was a Christmas gift to take photos with I still fail miserably so well, forgive the somewhat blurriness on the bone picture. Maybe this blog will inspire me to improve my food photography skills and get some prettier plates, but hey, I'm just a cook with a hankering for meat. (There's also a knife cut in my bone marrow, I got a little too hasty to eat, I had actually already eaten the other half before I took this picture so that is why you only see one bone) Also, with my marrow, some parts were a darkish brown and some parts were a lighter yellow color, it all tasted delicious so I wouldn't worry too much about it, I am thinking the darkish brown color is where blood had pooled up and cooked or just where some parts cooked more than others.

A lot of people may think it is gross to eat the marrow from the middle of a cow bone, hell, when I called my butcher yesterday to see if she had some she thought they were for my dogs and was pretty taken aback when I informed her I would actually be eating them myself and when my boyfriend tried to tell his friends what he was having tonight for dinner they reacted with a chorus of 'ews' not knowing what flavor bombs they might be missing out on. Bone marrow is like heaven, well, unless you are a vegetarian, then it might be more like hell, but you get what I mean. Americans too often let so many delicious parts of the animal go to waste and I hope for this blog to maybe help push people to try the parts of animals that we don't normally hear about eating, the parts that aren't ground up and made into hamburgers and to try other sources of meat that aren't chicken, cow, or pig. You see ground bison in your store, go ahead and pick it up, make it just like you would ground beef. I once took ground kangaroo and cooked it into a traditional shepherd's pie, it was delicious, reminiscent of beef yet leaner and spicier. Have some 'balls' and eat some testicles if you see them on a menu. Life should be about exploration and being adventurous. Like they say, waste not, want not.