There are dishes served in my household that make the natives tremble with fear. Cauliflower soup, for one. “Do your homework or I’m making cauliflower soup for dinner” is a very successful deterrent to homework malaise—except for the fact that now I never actually get to make it, garnished with crème fraiche and caviar a lá the French Laundry recipe. (Woe is me—seriously.)

Then there are those ingredients that are on the “Is there anything else to eat?” list, such as salad with bitter greens. I thrive on escarole in the winter, but I’m alone in the household. Which means I usually end up slurping Campari to get my bitter quotient in. Braised lettuce, even sweated in butter, inspires a chorus of boos. Do I live with philistines or what?

Tonight, however, the household revolt reached its penultimate climax when my wife and kids added one more dish to their hate list, which they titled, ignominiously, “dog-bone dinner.”

That would be the beef marrow and parsley salad made famous the world over by Mr. Nose to Tail, Fergus Henderson of St. John Restaurant in London. In October Henderson released Beyond Nose to Tail: More Omnivorous Recipes for the Adventurous Cook (Bloomsbury USA), which inspired me to dig out this classic recipe from his first book.

My daughter entered the kitchen and made the kid face that universally translates as “Oh my god! I can’t believe that you expect me to actually eat that!” She immediately retreated to her room and returned seconds later with a fluorescent orange streak drawn under her nostrils. This technique was completely new to me. She preferred an artificially scented highlighter marker (citrus in this case) under her nose to the smell of marrow that perfumed the kitchen.

My wife outright refused to even try a bite, non-negotiable. She absolutely will not eat anything that quivers, which is what marrow does when it’s plopped onto a slice of toast. I strong-armed my son into eating one piece of marrow-slathered toast in hopes that he’d come over to my side of the culinary divide, but he claimed indifference and asked for a pork tamale as backup instead.

I confess to knowing that a beef marrow salad would not go over too well at the Cole dinner table {smirk}, but I had to try. After all, I’m supposed to be the poster boy for the eat-the-whole-animal, nothing-goes-to-waste sustainable deal. But in our jaded household, I’ve played the nose-to-tail card so many times that my wife and kids just roll their eyes when I try to justify serving them something other than a breast or a leg for dinner.

Just wait ’til I defrost that squirrel in the freezer…

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