Love Dog Café

You need good fish stock. I like to use halibut for this because at the restaurant we get fresh whole fish and fillet them up on our largest work surface removing all the gorgeous white flesh and piling the smaller bits for soup and nibbling. I can’t fillet a halibut without thinking of some skin I saw in Alaska once that had been dried and used for shoe leather. I keep my biggest soup pot ready and put in every scrap of the fish that is left over, skin, tail, bone…everything. I throw in onions then as well as all the onion skins and trimmings from vegetables we have peeled for other projects, always celery, parsley stems, potato peels, nothing is rejected. Then I turn on the faucet and bring the water up from the water table that runs underground here and I fill the pot with water. I let it boil all day adding some lemons including the peel, (savory herbs from the garden, including sorrel and fiddleheads if you are so lucky to have them, wild kelp), salt, pepper, tasting and letting it condense down to a gallon or so of liquid gold. The color at this point is fabulous and the flavor should be good enough to strain and serve it as consommé! That’s the stock. It can be frozen or used right away.