L'Os a Moelle

Holy shit. You all will NOT believe what I ate last night. It just goes to prove my assertion that the French will eat any part of an animal's body. Including (drum roll, please..)

THE BONE MARROW.

I shit you not. We went over to the apartment of Claire's uncle Thierry last night for dinner. Thierry works for La Chambre de Commerce de Paris at L'Ecole Ferandi, one of France's famous restaurant schools, and is a master of the French culinary arts. As such, whenever we go over to eat there we end up having an impressive variety of classic French dishes. As one of the side dishes, he had prepared "l'os a moelle" (bone marrow), in which each person is served a single, very recognizable, cow vertebrae. You eat it by scooping out the soft insides, which are applied to a peice of bread and sprinkled with a little salt. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a great picture of the dish (only histologic sections of actual bone marrow) other than what I'm showing here. But you can definitely tell what it is when you're eating it. Anyways, it's actually not so bad. It has a fatty taste to it which is not so bad. A wikipedia article on bone marrow suggests that eating it even lowers your LDL cholesterol (the bad kind).

I still can't friggin' believe that I ate bone marrow for dinner last night. Me, the guy who wouldn't even try pizza until college and whose idea of foreign food consisted of Mexican tortilla chips and the occasional fortune cookie up until the age of 21. Unbelievable.

Of note, the word "l'os a moelle" refers solely to the bone marrow as food. The scientific word for bone marrow is "moelle osseuse".