Solvent Pink

"Pirelli's Miracle Elixir" was a hair-restoring patent medicine sold by a traveling Italian barber in the musical Sweeney Todd, one by which in its aftermath of locksly luxuriance "you can have your pick, Sir, of the girls".

"DSL. Fuel For Fish", by whose addition to your water when cooking frozen Atlantic salmon heads (@ 49¢/lb. at Hannaford, in ten-pound boxes) you may have your picking out, Madam, the hundreds of pin-bones - and cartilage and even teeth - from the resulting slurry all but eliminated, turns out to be, as you may have guessed, white vinegar, at about a quart per gallon of cooking water.

Now all of that mineral-rich fishy Skeletor mass, as of my cooking today of my second batch of six heads of almost two pounds apiece, reduces itself to powder under each chomp like so many Flintstones Vitamins With Calcium, or, indeed, like the little chalky bones, all eminently edible, spining your canned salmon or mackerel or sardines.

So there's a good hour of labor from last time saved right there.

Not to mention about five pounds of combined meat and bones from the original ten-pound box, and about a gallon of oil-rich broth to use later.

I remembered to cut out the gills this time, on either side of each head, which are said to otherwise somewhat embitter the resulting flavor, though I recall the overall cast of mind - fish is brain food, after all - of the last batch to have been reasonably sweet in Nature, if still in its latter aspect as red in at least tooth if not claw (wait till I get my hands on some lobster- or crab-heads at like ocean-floor prices) as Tennyson in his memoriam to Hallam wished to suggest, given the powers of incision of the teeth, the latter of which from the second batch now reduced to virtual milk teeth in your mouth after cooking in vinegar water.

So, what did we do this week to rob the industrial-food robber barons of their ill-gotten birthrights? 

We made homemade thick-as-a-brick Greek-style yogurt at around one-fifteenth the price, per 100-calorie serving, of the rippiest of 5.3 oz Stonyfield ripoffs (my 110 calories milk for 15.6¢ vs their 80 calories yogurt for $1.69). 

And we simmered salmon, in head form, at c. 98¢ (49¢/lb. x 2) per pound of cooked edible meat and bone. 

Yogurt and salmon - they go together like milk and mackerel.

In my post on Greek yogurt, I mentioned sprouting beans as another project. Let's add fermenting vegetables in there, too, especially after my accidental discovery of it after leaving a bowl of uneaten greens with hot sauce sitting out for a few days and then stomach-testing the soured results to good and so far non-fatal effect.