Marrow Bones - How to make a trendy appetizer for a fraction of the cost.

We ate at a great little restaurant last week and had this:

Roasted marrow bones with sweet onion marmalade and garlic crostini. As you can see it was 8 bucks for 3 marrow bones - 4 pieces of toast, four roasted garlic cloves and some onion marmalade. I had a feeling I could beat that price and I was right.

Five Marrow Bones for $2.31

An entire head of garlic: 33 cents.

Pre-sliced baguette for $1.69

Roasted Garlic Onion Jam - 5 bucks, but I'm only using about 1/6 of a jar for this recipe. It's great to use in things that require a bit of oniony - garlic flavor when you're feeling a bit lazy.

A sprig of Thyme - currently free in my garden.

Pre-heat your oven to 450.

Pull the papery skin from your garlic clove

Slice off the top of the garlic and drizzle with a bit of oil

Wrap in foil and pop in the oven. Garlic should roast for at least 30 minutes.  When the garlic has roasted for 10 minutes, it will be time to put the marrow bones in the oven.

Put them in a foil lined pan. Hit with a bit of salt and I tossed in some fresh thyme. Now put it in the oven with the garlic.

You might also want to consider cleaning your oven before you take pictures of it, but that's totally up to you. While the garlic and the bones roast together in happiness. Tackle the bread. If you are more industrious that me, you could buy a baugette and slice it yourself. I likes the pre-sliced stuff. Now toss those pretty little bread slices in some olive oil.

Put your pretty little toasts on a baking sheet lined with foil or parchment paper

Right at the 30 minute mark for the garlic, putt it out and put the toasts in. Now unwrap the garlic from the foil and using a towel to hold it, so you don't get burned, give it a big squeeze into a bowl or onto a plate. It should come out in a paste.

Now mash that paste with a fork

Your marrow bones should be done by now

At the restaurant, they served them on a plate like this along with a whole roasted garlic clove. In the absense of marrow forks, I found this a little difficult to manage. So I'm poking out the marrow myself with a narrow knife and putting it in a bowl. Then I'm adding about half that garlic paste to the bowl. You can use the rest if for all sorts of tasty garlicky applications.

It does not look pretty at all. But it will taste great. Like a beefy butter with garlic. Now fetch your toasts from the oven and make them fancy through the magic of a rectangular plate! Or use any plate you like. After all, this is America.

Now spread just a small dab of the marrow/garlic mixture on each slice of bread

Give it a sprinke of sea salt and freshly ground pepper.

Cleaning up your work area before you take photographs of it is also a good idea that I seem to have ignored. Now put on just a dab of that delicious onion jam.

I think I made roughly 4 times as much with what I used at home than we got at the restaurant. So let's take a base cost of $32.00 for this at a restaurant. What it cost at home:

$2.31 for the marrow bones
     33 cents for the garlic
     85 cents for the toasts. I bought the bag for $1.69, but I onl.y used half
  1.00 for the onion marmalade. The jar was 5 bucks, but I only used about a fifth of it on this dish.

   $4.49 for  the entire dish vs. $32 dollars for the same amount at a restaurant.  Plus you have some garlic paste left over and some bones for your pets to play with. Not bad. it was fairly delicious.