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

Among these things was 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 was ready for new meals to conquer.

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

A single cow tail makes about 3 quarts of broth.

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.

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.

I do, however, have a walk-OUT freezer.

That solved that issue quite nicely, though it takes a while for nearly a gallon of bath-water-warm liquid to cool enough that the fat solidifies.

By the time I removed the fat, it was bed time, and I needed to store the broth until morning.

Caz gets Farmer's Dog food - it comes frozen in one-a-day plastic wrappers. The monthly food box is insulated with a couple sheets of chunky styrofoamish insulation in a paper-wrapped sheath.

This insulation is really too nice to discard every month.

What with combining three households, I've got a plethora of almost-matched curtain sets.

So, it made sense to fasten the insulation to the backs of some mis-matched curtains to make a thermal curtain. I hung these over the sliding door-wall in the basement that I never use.

Now you see where the strange digression into dog food has led us. The soup-pot of broth fit nicely between the curtain and the outside door-wall. In the morning, when I rescued it, the broth was a bit cooler than 'fridge temperature and had solidified into a gel.

About a half gallon of this went into my biggest sauce pan, with the meat I collected, some carrots and slightly freezer burned green beans and frozen hash-brown potatoes.

It's a great day to be simmering soup. A little warmth, a little humidity, and even lunch!

Now all I have to do is eat a lot of soup.