Salmon collar soup

I am a lover of salmon. Salmon cooked most ways and most parts of salmon I would gladly eat--well, cooked well, hopefully--smoked in sandwiches (I make it with avocado and thinly sliced cucumbers), fresh sashimi with just enough wasabi to plunge your nasal clear, or in salmon avocado roll, or baked or seared (but NOT TOO DRY! what blasphemy). It is a pretty color. It is fatty so it tastes good. It is also good for you. Omega 3! Omega 3! People covet after omega three so much they add them to eggs and cranberries. Why not salmon? Cuz some people are too lame. (Or too poor. Then you are excused and much sympathized with).

I've had salmon head a few ways. Japanese salt-broiled at a restaurant. Plain, pure, creamy white salmon head soup, at a fancy buffet, that tasted like all the richness that the fish has to offer and absolutely nothing else. I had and still have no idea how they got rid of the fishiness. It looked like the only ingredients were salmon head and water, and you only know there is salt not from saltiness but from the delicacy of taste that the correct dash of salt brings out in light soups. And I know better than to try replicate this seemingly impossibly simple yet actually impossibly impossible feast. So instead when I had bought salmon collar on sale (head, tail, bones, fins and scraps of one fish, which I halved to make two batches) I made sure my fish was pan fried with ample slices of ginger and scallion (and just a little oil to render its own fat) for at least half a minute before I added water, carrots, onions and potatoes. It would be my earthly and not at all mysterious poor-man rendition of salmon head soup. It actually came out surprisingly well from my careless winging. I obviously only had half a head in one big pot of soup, with other scraps filling in the roles. But when I've simmered it down for 20-30 min (I was afraid to go over b/c the fish will flake and fall off, but it proved more than enough to soften the carrots and potatoes), the creamy goodness of collagen and brain and eye and fat and whatever brings the most goosebumps to your arms had imbued the rest broth, and carrot lent a certain delicate sweetness, potato a hearty, fragrant starchiness that whirled together into a pretty passable score among dishes with fish head as its main ingredient. Each batch of soup lasted me three meals. Definitely a good deal. I could keep rhyming if only salmon was teal. But salmon is also loved by seal.

Something worth mentioning: it was absolutely traumatizing to have to clean up the raw collar. I had to handle an animal head. I could not look at it for too long because I felt like the eyes were looking at me. It made me want to be a vegan forever, not just whenever I'm in the mood. I don't know whether it is a good thing or not that I did not follow through with the switch.

The picture was taken well in the early stages so the broth is still clear. I also threw in basil again cuz I needed to get rid of them, which turned out not nearly enough to taste like anything when you're not chewing themselves. I also should apologize for the scatter-brained quality of the entry. I am in a particularly volatile mood state.The whole thing took me 8 min to write. I think I am developing a habit of stress-writing. Though I don't even know from what I'm stressed.