If you want to be as ethical as possible, not only do you want to buy local and sustainable, you also want to maximise your food while minimising your waste. An excellent way to do so is making broth out of your leftovers. Whilst chicken bone broth has become increasingly popular over the past few years, not many people know you can make a delicious — and very healthy — broth out of fatty fish too. All animal products are indeed high in collagen, which is the most abundant protein in our body, and the most important one, as it’s responsible for connecting our organ tissues (including tendons, ligaments and skin). Vegetable collagen is unfortunately very hard to be absorbed and used by our bodies, but animal collagen is easily absorbed. Collagen is also held responsible for healing our guts, hair and damaged skin (it can also help with stretch marks and cellulite). When cooking broth, collagen is released from the animal’s bones and flesh, and loosed into the water in the form of gelatine. This is what makes broth so precious for your health.
It was around Easter time, and we found an incredible offer at Asda’s: a whole salmon (3Kg) worth £30 was reduced and on sale for only £13.99. Yes, 3Kg is too much for too people alone, unless you want to freeze the salmon, but the offer was too appealing not to take advantage of it — mostly because those poor salmons would otherwise have been fished in vain. So we bought one, cut it in 3 pieces, stuffed it with fresh ginger, rosemary, bay leaves, thymes, fresh parsley, Himalayan salt and lemon wedges, and baked it at 180°C for 30 minutes.
We ate nothing but salmon for 3 days straight, keeping all fishbones, head, tail, uneaten skin and flesh aside. At the end of the 3rd day, we decided to make some broth out of such leftovers.
The broth was unbelievably good and satiating. We had it plain, after our dinner, but it would have been just as delicious with some prawns or shrimps, courgettes and maybe rice noodles.
What’s more important for us, however, is that that poor salmon hasn’t died in vain: we benefitted from its death for 3 days, not harming any other animals meanwhile, and used it in all the possible ways. This is what mindful eating really means!
