I stripped the meat off the bones and put the carcass into a corningware bowl in my Instant-Pot. I pressed the "Soup Broth" button and let 'er go for a half hour.

Then I let it rest for another hour or so until it the broth was cool enough to handle.

The next step will be to make some Sogdian style rice pilaf with the broth.

I'm working on the 3'd Bard & Sigurd novel, and they are travelling into central Asia, following the Silk Road. I'd intended to make my mcguffin a Persian family of traders, but as I learn more about the time, I'm realizing that they'd be Sogdian's, not Persians. As such, they'd be influenced a lot by the Persian elephant in the room, but also by the Chinese end of their trade partnerships.

So I'm learning more about food and customs of medieval central Asia.

This was easier while Bard & Sigurd were in Constantinople. A Byzantine emperor wrote a cookbook, some pages of which have survived, so we know a little about what they ate.

The Sogdians didn't do this. What they did do was to wrap their dead in papers and store them in the back of old caves. These corpses were pretty useless, so they've been untouched for centuries. Archeologists are deciphering the papers and discovering the Sogdians used whatever scrap paper they had handy for wrapping the corpses. Grocery store receipts, tax bills, letters home and such.

Coincidently, we had a bout of polar vortex, which is a great time to empty the freezer onto the porch and defrost it.

Or, as it's commonly called, Voyage To The Land that Time Forgot.

A ham bone and an ox-tail (actually a steer tail) that I've been saving for broth finally met their fate. After the success with game-hen broth, I figured I needed new meals to conquer.

One of my neighbors raises cattle for his table. Once in a while he gives me a nice steak, or some innards in exchange for letting him hay one of my fields. The innards let me experiment with old-timey dishes like kidney, tongue, and heart for my books.

I was happy to discover that the steer-tail had been skinned before being packaged.

For those who (like me) have never Instant-Potted a cow tail. It takes about a half hour. I filled the big pan about half-full of water which was just enough to cover the bones. After the half hour, I turned off the Instant Pot and let it sit for a couple hours until the broth was bath-water warm.

A single cow tail makes about 3 quarts of broth.

It turns out that a beef tail has about a pint of meat in tiny chunks. Once the broth is cool enough to touch, you can strip the meat off the bones with your fingers.

Beef tails are very fatty. There's also almost a pint of grease sitting on the top of about 3 quarts of broth.

The traditional way of solving this issue is to cool the broth in the fridge, and dig out the solidified grease.

Alas, one of the things I don't have in my fridge is enough space for a 2 gallon soup pot. Unlike the fast food restaurants I worked at in college, I don't have a walk-in freezer, either.

Luckily, courtesy of the Polar Vortex, I have a walk-OUT freezer.

Next step was to actually use this beef and broth.

A trip to Costco got me way more long-grain basmati rice than I ever thought I'd need. The central Asians and Persians liked the long grain instead of the short-grain that we think of with Chinese and Japanese foods.

I used beef broth in place of the water for the next batch of rice. I covered a serving of this rice pilaf with I fried some chicken, with onion, cranberries, and carrot strips. I spiced this with Garam Masala from my favorite Middle-Eastern/Indian deli and ended up with a tasty Kabuli Pulao.

Kabuli Pulao is properly made with raisins, not cranberries, but I claim to cook in the traditional style -- "What do I have on hand."

Bard and Sigurd, of course, won't get any cranberries in their meal, but they are stuck with eating whatever is handy.