I de-boned a lamb shoulder and ended up with a ton of bones: some look like rib bones and others are just huge. Unlike the youtube video I watched, I have a lot more bones left over. No clue why or if I got an incorrectly labeled cut.
I already made a stew with all the meat (and in hindsight, probably should have tossed at least one bone in for flavor).
So, what should I do with all of the bones?
“Scotch broth”
Make lamb broth from the bones, and then cook barley, carrots, onions and celery in it. Plus add any shreds of meat you can scrape/pick off the bones once they’ve simmered a long time.
Roast the bones (brush with oil, salt) til brown and lovely, then toss in a big pot of water with a couple of carrots, a couple of leeks and a couple of stalks of celery. Simmer 'til the bones are clean, reduce broth til tasty, strain, use as the basis of a soup.
This. Except I don’t put the veggies in until the last hour of simmering.
Why is that, if you’re going to strain it all out anyway?
I put the veggies in early, in large chunks, along with dried herbs. After the broth has reduced, I remove the bones and the now-sogged veggies and discard. If I’m making soup right away, then I add fresh veggies, meat, potatoes, whatever, and cook until done.
A few reasons:
during the first hour or so, you get a lot of scum from the protein and such in the bones. I like to skim that off, and the veggies get in the way
I tend to cook my stock for a long time, so long that if I put the veggies in right away, I risk them turning to mush and being hard to get out of the stock
I’m generally too lazy to trim and cut veggies in the morning when I start the stock, and manage to procrastinate doing it all day, and you get most of the good flavor out of the veggies in an hour or two so no need to hurry
Some veggies - like carrots - tend to overpower if they cook too long, IMO.
Darned celery roots…
At any rate, yeah, make lamb stock and use it next time you’re making a stew or soup where a lamb flavor would be appropriate. (The Scotch Broth idea, in particular, is quite nice.) For example, I would not hesitate to use the stock in a beef stew, for instance, although I’d be a little more cautious with lighter meats like chicken. Something like burgoo or Brunswick stew or any type of stew with multiple meats would be perfect.
These are all great ideas 
The bones are now 5 days old. They’ve been refrigerated. Are they still okay to use?
Well, if you have a lot of bones you could make a really scary skeletal lamb. Holloween is coming up after all.
Yeah, but I’d cook or freeze them today or tomorrow.
My favorite these days is a yellow split pea soup made with lamb stock:
Sautee 2 chopped onions & 1 c. celery
Add 2 c. yellow split peas
Add ~ 2 qts. lamb stock
Simmer until the split peas start disolve (maybe 1.5 hours? I’ve been doing this one in a prssure cooker on high for ~ 35 min.)
Salt and pepper to taste
Add 2 t. cardamom and juice of one lemon at the end
It’s one of those recipes in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, for sure.
Sure. If you freeze them, I’d really recommend using a vacuum sealer. One of the best purchases I’ve made. Got a couple of 2-lb blocks of cheese on sale? Cut them up into half-pound pieces, vacuum seal, and they stay good for a very long time. I still have some of a wheel of Oregonzola that I bought last year sitting in the fridge, fresh as the day I bought it. Also can’t beat it for freezing meats/fish.
I think I got this from an Anthony Bourdain book - if you’re doing any of the stocks people have listed above, and boil it down (low, low heat, keep an eye on it, you know the drill) till it’s thick as syrup and then pour it into ice tray thingies and freeze them. Then next time you need stock you can pop an ice cube out of your tray and throw it into whatever you’re making.
(I suppose it would be better with chicken stock, I guess, since you’d be able to use that in more things.)
EDIT: Also, lindsaybluth - hot ham water? Har.
Yep, that’s how I do my stocks these days. It looks pretty disheartening when you boil down an entire pot of stock into a tray full of ice cubes, but it works wonders. Not only is it great for reconstituting into the original stock (mine go down to about 10% of their original volume), they are awesome for pan sauces and just “amping” up any gravy or soup if it’s not meaty enough. Basically, you’re making something like homemade “Better than Bouillon.” (“Glace de viande” is the culinary name for this concentrated meat syrup.)
There is a slight difference in flavor between a reconstituted stock in this way and a straight stock (the reconstituted stock has a bit more cooked down, caramelized flavor to it), but I haven’t noticed it making any difference in most recipes. Perhaps if you want a very delicate broth for torellini al brodo or something like that, but, to be honest, I’d be fine with using the reconstituted cubes.
And saves a ton of freezer space!
Huh, glace like demi-glace? Cool. Never knew it had a name. I actually threw one of these into a bowl of ramen I had the other day and it wasn’t half bad.