"To me, making stock is a hassle, and antithetical to home cooking. It belongs to the realm of professional kitchens with salaried dishwashers," writes Jane Sigal in the New York Times. My sentiments exactly. But luckily for those of us suffering the kind of late-winter malaise that only a rich, home-cooked soup can cure, the answer is at hand: Soup bones.
Now that nose-to-tail dining seems to have a permanent place in the foodie firmament, soup bones have gone from being the kind of thing only offered at obscure butcher shops in far-flung ethnic neighborhoods to something you can find next to the organic pork chops at your local farmer's market. And the bones on offer have gone beyond the traditional beef shank and hog trotter, with goat bones and bison marrow popping up in the stew pot as well.
Sigal offers up four soup recipes, all enriched with a different kind of bone: Tangy red lentil soup with nicoise olives, which calls for chicken backs; creamy celery root soup with ham, which uses a ham bone; lima bean and porcini soup, using either lamb neck bones on beef shin bones; and a beets and greens borscht with shin bones.
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