Photo Credit: John Lee
Blame it on the news cycle, but last week I found myself simmering a stock of bones from last year’s hunt. A game stock, as it were—the shin of a modest-sized elk, sawed in half above shank, osso bucco style browned under the broiler on the bottom rack, no oil no splatter.
Earlier that day I had purchased a “put” option on GameStop for my IRA, a modest investment in the possibility this particular stock might crater. Sure, three hedge funds had lost their shirts, and a combined $3 billion, on precisely the same bet just one week before. But I reckoned my anti-c0ntrarian wager deserved a place in a well-balanced portfolio and had structured my investment so the maximum loss would be limited to forty-four bucks, whilst my gains, if the Game were to Stop in short order, would be in the thousands of bones.
This is not investment advice, you degenerate gamblers. You don’t need GameStop in your portfolio, of course, and you don’t need game bones to make a bone stock, when beef, chicken or basically any other bones will do. Billionaire bones being the most succulent, if you believe the Wall Street Bets message board on Reddit, also known as “r/wsb.”
Me, I prefer herbivores, but even those gentle plant eaters can murk you. Once, I skied down the wrong side of the ridge after a cow elk, with my ski goggles on because of the blowing snow, and my trusty .270 on my back. In hot pursuit of my prey, I felt like James, skiing after the bad guys. Not James Stock, if you know what I mean.
I finally made it out, empty handed and mildly hypothermic at two in the morning, contemplating the risk I had just taken to chase that elk. They don’t all get away, but you have to stay in the game to have a chance. As for my bet against GameStop, who knows? There isn’t anything new there. Even the short squeeze that everyone is talking about is old news. What goes up must come down. With forty-four hundred pennies in that silly game, and some James Bonds in case Game Stop actually manages to punch a black swan-sized hole in the price/time continuum of the money jungle and let in the vacuum of deleveraging.\
And you never know who they’ll go after next, or how much the market might unwind, or how some Game Stop bulls will digest the reality that buying a worthless stock at sky-high prices does not always equate to “sticking it to the man.”
I noticed that my bones had achieved a rich umami bronze, so I put them in an Instant Pot—one of those electric pressure cookers that doesn’t rattle and hiss on the stovetop like it’s about to blow up like Melvin Capital. (Any pressure cooker will do, or a big kettle and a longer time horizon). Whatever the game, be it stocks, bonds, bears, bulls, hunting, gathering, wheeling and or dealing with game of life, the quest for survival guides our decisions, and has sculpted our bodies, increased our mental processing capacity and sharpened our instincts through the ages. Managing my IRA, in other words, is the closest thing to being both predator and prey that I can think of, next to a Texas wild boar hunt.
I was ready for dinner, but dinner was not ready for me. Making game stock means playing a long game of cooking, and I had to let it cool to room temperature, and then skim the fat. And then I had my game stock, a versatile enhancer of flavor and mouthfeel, fortified with minerals and dissolved connective tissues. These glorious, protein-rich materials feel like fat, despite being mostly amino acids. Add this protein creme to sauces, soups, stir-fry and curry, or this recipe for SHORT r/ib Pho with SQUEEZED lime.
Short Squeezed Lime Rib Pho
A twist on a recipe from The Pho Cookbook by Andrea Nguyen, the Beard Award-winning pho-nom. Serves 8
Ingredients
Broth
- 4 lbs beef short ribs
- 2 ½ star anise pods (20 robust points, total)
- 1 3-inch piece of cinnamon3 whole cloves
- A chubby, 2-inch section of ginger, peeled, thickly sliced, bruised
- 1 large yellow onion, halved and thickly sliced
- 2 ¼ teaspoons fine sea salt
- 2 tablespoons fish sauce
- 1 teaspoon sugar
Added separately to each bowl
- 10 oz dried, narrow rice noodles
- Cooked meat from the pot½ small red or yellow onion, thinly-sliced against the grain and soaked in water for 10 minutes
- 2 thinly-sliced green onions, green parts only
- ¼ cup chopped fresh cilantro
- Black pepper, to taste
- Optional: bean sprouts, chile slices, mint, Thai basil, lime wedges, hoisin sauce, sriracha sauce. hoisin sauce
Procedure
Rinse ribs. Brown them under the broiler on the bottom shelf to melt off some fat, because ribs have so much.
Toast the spices on medium heat in the pressure cooker for a few minutes, shaking or stirring, until fragrant. Add ginger and onion; stir until aromatic and slightly charred.
Add four cups water to stop the cooking process. Add the ribs, apple, salt, and five more cups of water. Lock the lid and pressure cook for 20 minutes at 15 psi or higher.
While the broth cooks, soak the noodles in hot water until pliable and opaque. Drain, rinse and drain again. At serving time, dunk the noodles in boiling water to ensure they’re hot and cooked. Divide among four bowls. Add rib meat to the bowls, along with the onion, green onion, cilantro and other herbs. Heat the broth to a simmer and ladle into the bowls. Add condiments to tweak flavor. Finish with a big squeeze of lime.
