Night of the Neckbones!

It was an untypical night. We were feeling a little need to be in touch with our southern roots.  My oldest was inspired by a smothered pork chop recipe and really wanted something different for dinner. There were various meat products in the freezer that needed to be eaten since the freezer burn clock was ticking........
Voila! Neckbones!
 For some strange reason, there seemed to be several packages of them in the back of the freezer and I only used the smoked ones when making cabbage or greens, so how did we end up with so many packages anyway? Errrrr, whatever. Let's do something with them! Smothered porkchops, neckbones, smorkchops, smeckbones, smothered neckbones! (Did you see the evolution in that?) So somewhere, someone had made them and it was up to Google to help us find a recipe.
We were directed to Iheartcooking.com where the grainy video appeared to make the upcoming dish look delicious! (I also viewed the Ghetto Cooking Show version of this dish and was highly distracted by the strange blouse/bra strap and lecture about Whitney Houston's unfortunate death.)
Needless to say, my oldest had her heart set on this dish and it looked like we needed another package to make sure the teenagers had enough to make their meal. A run to Wal-Mart- here we go....
Now wash the bones, season them and put them in the oven. Make gravy, pour over bones and bake some more. Sounded easy and they were looking great!.
Side dishes included rice, roasted brussel sprouts and a cucumber salad.
Only the oldest, 5yr old and I knew what we were serving up for dinner, so when the others sat down at the table to eat, they had a big surprise.  A lovely dish full of browned bones and gravy! My son had an uplifting eyebrow moment and plowed forth, piling some on his plate and speculating how to best partake of the road ahead.
The two youngest had to have the meat scraped and pulled of of their bones so as not to provoke choking. (We actually like them, you know!)
The 11 yr old had the biggest smile since this was a hands-on meal and she is all about getting her hands messy.
Mr. didn't say much for a few minutes because he was surveying what to do next. He placed some on his plate and dug in too. After about 4 minutes, there were questions of " Where is the meat on this?, I got a bone!, and "When is the dinner coming???" There was lots of laughter and passing around of napkins and choking on over salted brussel sprouts. Baby Dear wanted more meat and with a shuffling of hands and rattling of bones, someone produced a tablespoon of meat to top her rice.

 Where's the meat???

                                                       
Mr. broke the silence with, "Bacon brings vegetarians back to meat, neckbones drive people away from it!". The son says, "Is this what happens when Dracula is the butcher?"
By the time we finished eating them, we figured we had burned more calories than we ate! Too much work for so little meat. "If we wanted to trick folks into having a near vegetarian meal then you should have said something!"
We had a good laugh and had to eat something else to make up for the deficit!

"The Tower of Bones"as interpreted by Wyn