Fish heads, fish heads rolly polly fish heads. Fish heads, Fish Heads eat them up yum……

I expect my younger fans will not remember this but it is a song from the past, a song sung by our kids at one time.

Pat went off to church this morning and stopped in at the local Thrifty’s to pick up some milk.  For some reason she stopped to watch the fish butcher cutting up fresh Halibut.

Now many grocery stores have open views of the meat butcher chopping up loins, but here on the Island we have visible fish butchers (or I suspect the proper term is mongers) chopping heads and tails and creating slabs of fresh fish.  The monger was pushing the heads and tails and fins to one side on the table.  Pat asked him “what do you do with that?”  He replied (probably thinking, well we mostly throw it in the garbage) “We sell it at 19 cents a pound”. Pat said “Load it on” and came home with a bundle that cost her $3.75.

She arrived home very excited on her purchase with the view that it was now my job to go through the pile and cut off the good bits.  Turns out there was lots of great Halibut pieces (about 1 lb or 500g) so a bargain.  I was able to fillet off the easy pieces from the remnants but we were left with 2 kg (about 5 lbs) of heads, fins and fat layers of fresh Halibut with lots of meat.  I expect chefs around the world would love to have had our opportunity.

So I took out our biggest pot and spent the morning making fish stock with veggies and spices.  Even after reduction we have a gallon of this fragrant juice.

Great concept but what do you do with a gallon of fish stock?  We do have some deep freeze sections in our two fridges but this takes up some space.  I suspect we will be having lots of fish chowder and bouillabaisse over the next week or more.