Salmony up there likes me
Blaze enjoying a salmon head, via Creekside Border Collies, Canton-de-Hatley, Quebec
Not only do I find both Blaze's and J.B.'s priorities of unimpeachable wholesomeness, I also find, with no small servings of self-serving, their immediate echo in my own more important news: I got close to five pounds of actual edibles from the first of my two ten-pound boxes of Frozen Atlantic Salmon Fish Heads.
At 49 cents per pound frozen, that's 98 cents per pound of pure salmon.
Of the six heads in the box, I cut up five of the heads for soup on Tuesday and baked the sixth on Wednesday.
It took me close to an hour after straining the pot of soup to pick out what felt like a thousand pine needles of tiny bones from the slurry left over after I retrieved the bigger chunks - a function, no doubt, of the untutored manner in which, winging it from first to last, I commenced to both cut the heads up and make the soup.
Removing the bones from the single baked head took perhaps five minutes.
The bones were fairly light - about three and one-third pounds of the original ten. Of the six and two thirds pounds of non-bone salmon that therefore went into the pot and baking dish, subtract one and two-thirds pounds, or one-fourth that - the textbook standard for raw-to-cooked water reduction in bone-free meat, poultry and fish - and you're left with five pounds of cooked flesh, skin - and creamy, heart-and-brain-friendly fat, rich in both omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin D.
For the soup, I included seasoning salt and two curry blends, one homemade, along with chopped onion, carrot and green pepper.
I placed the sixth head on the second day in a large stainless-steel mixing bowl, and covered it with a smaller such bowl, baked it at around 250 degrees for over an hour, and seasoned it to taste after de-boning it once it had cooled a bit.
For the second ten-pound box, I may use Chef Paul Prudhomme's Salmon Magic rub on one portion, and perhaps Wright's Liquid Smoke on another.
Perhaps blending some of the salmon with cream cheese might be in order.
My search of the Hannaford web site reveals that around one in five of the stores within both a twenty-mile radius and a fifty-mile radius of me list the frozen salmon heads on their inventory pages, though the fish-counter man at the Dover branch where I bought my catch noted that customers must inquire after them, as they are, when in stock, kept in the back rooms rather than on display, and can be ordered for delivery in about two days.
Since Asian markets are also proverbial for such items, I may wish to add those here in the Dover-Portsmouth-Rochester area for backup and/or price competition as well, though they would, I think, find themselves hard-pressed to match 49 cents per pound.
As long as I have a regular vendor, I plan to eat a few ounces of salmon every day, along with my usual standbys in chicken (89 cents/lb.), shank portion half hams ($1.39, just down to 99 cents round Easter), whole turkey ($1.09, down to 59 cents round Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter), beef liver ($1.79), chicken liver ($1.79/20 oz.), pork liver (99 cents), canned mackerel ($1.79/15 oz.) and canned Pacific sardines in tomato sauce ($1.79).
The fish-counter man told me that a doctor orders the salmon heads there regularly, cooks out the oil and uses it and apparently it alone from his ten pound box, as medicine, claiming that he never gets sick.
It's probably too much to ask, though, in my case, for the salmon, after fighting off fearsome ruffians after my heart and what's left of my brain, to sprout a third arm and do likewise to the demons of gout currently once more laying siege to my right foot (blogger, heal thyself).
And so for the latest time, I am seized by the odd urge to write an idiosyncratic dictionary and prop my feet up in an ancient men's club in one or another of the world's surviving monarchies.
Suggested reading:
Chef Paul Prudhomme's Magic Seasoning Blends ~ Salmon Magic
Chemical Flavor, Liquid Smoke
Liquid smoke
Liquid smoke...or not?
Wright's All natural Hickory Seasoning Liquid Smoke, 3.5-Ounce Bottles (Pack of 12)
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