Them bones, them bones, them dry bones

So I made, as we know, oxtail marmalade. With four pounds of oxtails. Stewed for hours in wine and port, then the meat picked off and the fat and gristle discarded, and... Yeah. I still had the bones. That's quite a lot of bone.

So I looked at 'em and thought, I wonder...?

And put them in the slow cooker with another round of stock-making veggies, and left it all to seethe overnight. Thinking that if nothing else, if there were no flavour left in the bones, at least I'd have a vegetable stock to make soup with.

And yesterday we had roasted beef marrow on toast, which leads again to bones; so today I am boiling down the oxtail stock with the marrow bones, and oh boy: the resultant liquor is sooo intensely beefy, it's just lovely. I love making stock. The only problem is not having enough tuperwares to freeze it in and enough space in the freezer.

This afternoon, I'll break down the goose carcase and make goose stock. And then I will have twice as much stock, but exactly the same problem. And a trouble shared is a trouble halved, right...?

Disintegration of a formerly stout fellow

Breaking down a goose? Not so easy as you might have thought, actually. It's a lot more ... structural ... than the more tender birds. I'm quite significantly more impressed with my carving job of yesterday than I had been until I got my hands on the carcase. There was still a lot of meat to garner, but that was intentional; I'd taken pretty much everything I'd been aiming for. And what remained was more ... bonded to the bone than I am used to. A tendon for every nugget, as it were.

So. I feel I've earned this beer. And we have a bowlful of meat, more than I need for tonight's risotto of goose and mushroom and leek; and there is still a lot of goodness to be gained from the bones, which have gone into the slow cooker to turn to stock overnight.

I am also expecting another effusion of fat, from that stock. I have a new theory, which says that the next time I want goose fat? Much more economical, besides being much more fun, just to buy a goose. They only seem expensive if you don't consider the quantity and value of the fat. Never mind roasting potatoes, I could make confit with this lot.