Best EVER Beef Stock

I was going to go to sleep but I just had to post quickly about the beef stock that I made today since it is the best beef stock I have ever tried.

The recipe is of course from trusty AllRecipes.com. But, as with all stocks, you can really substitute a lot of the ingredients. For example, I didn't have any celery today so I tossed in some celery seeds. I also didn't have any parsnips. The addition of parsnips in stocks is a worthwhile one if you have them on hand. A word to the wise though, be careful with parsnips. A little bit goes a long way. And parsnips will really sweeten up a stock.

I think the most important ingredient that I added to my stock today was the beef bones (and not just because these are clearly the essential ingredients - I believe they were of a superior quality and that accounted for the final result). When we got our 1/4 cow this fall we got all of the soup bones. They have been in the freezer for months and I have been meaning to make a beef stock with them. Oh My Gosh they added soooo much flavor to this stock. There was still quite a bit of meat on them so when they roasted up in the beginning the flavor from this meat really came out.

Basically I could go on and on about this stock but I encourage you to just see for yourself. You can purchase soup bones from your butcher. I have seen them also in the meat cases in the past but since our investment in bulk meat last fall I haven't spent too much time at butcher counters recently. I have also asked farmers at the farmers market for soup bones in the past and they have handed them over free of charge. Hey, it's worth asking.