where did Monday go?

I don't remember what happened to Monday, but it's Tuesday already, half over at that.  It seems to take all my willpower to get up in the cold and dark and immerse myself in water to swim at 6 in the morning. No time or focus for a blog then and later, I seem to have shot my entire wad of willpower in that one, wet, shivering half  hour of discipline.  So yesterday was blogless.  (Spelcheck just tried to correct it to bloodless, but I mean blogless.  Don't you hate it when it thinks it knows better than you?) Where was I? Here, now, and I do have something totally irrelevant to ask.

Have you been able to find soup bones where you live?  They are very scarce here.  I went for two years without finding pork hocks, except expensive smoked ones, overkill for soup, and finally found some yesterday.  Coming up after the current soup (chicken vegetable right now) - coming up - is pork hock pea soup, so thick you can stand a spoon up in it. Last week I found cut up beef shank bones, but only one had any marrow. A few weeks ago I bought a beef brisket, haven't seen one since.  What's wrong with people?  Is it the store or the shopper?  Doesn't anyone make soup?  Surely in this weather people cook up great steaming pots of hearty, warm, thick, delicious  soup.  

I wasn't going to get into food in my blog because so many people already do. Julie Powell parlayed her blog about cooking Julia Child into a best-selling book and movie.  But a cold winter and a dearth of soup bones has forced me into a blog bleat about soup.  My first cookbook was about leftovers and the backbone of the book, if you'll pardon the expression, was soup.  I used to say that a good soup required a history not a recipe.  That's still true, but I do buy ingredients for soup as well, especially bones.  I freeze onion parings and celery tops and limp carrots.  They all add flavour and vitamins to the stock.  If you've ever wondered what to do with the gills of Portobello mushrooms, wonder no more: add them to the vegetables in the soup pot. 

I'm still cold. I'm going to have a cup of soup. The sooner I finish this lot, the sooner I get to the pork hocks.