When we have the wood stove going full blast during cold snaps, it’s nice to put the soup pot on the stove. I’d made soup with carrots and celery left in the fridge when I got home from Madagascar, and ate through that. When I wanted to make another one, I was looking through the freezer and saw some salmon that the seal had broken on the vac pack but looked in great condition. So I grabbed those, and more, a pack of beach asparagus and a pack of fiddleheads. I’d never tried fiddleheads in soup. I grabbed two 8 cup bags of deer bone stock, too.
I put the pot on the stove on a trivet, and put in the frozen stock to thaw. Next, I boiled the fiddleheads, discarded the water, then salted them to try to firm them up a bit, and sauteed them in butter. I roughly chopped up the beach asparagus. I was curious if the beach asparagus would make the soup too salty, but it did not. I removed the skin and rib bones from the salmon fillet portions, cubed the meat, and sort of browned it in butter. Not sure if I needed to do that or not. I thought maybe it would hold together better in the soup, and it did hold together, but not sure if the browning helped or not. I chopped two big yellow onions. The frozen stock had mostly thawed, and put the rest of the ingredients into the pot. I put the pot directly on the stove now, and it took a good long while for the soup to come to a boil, so I moved it to the stove to get it boiling. I added some salt, pepper and garlic powder, and a few handfuls of left over rice and half a bag of frozen corn.
The first bowl was good, but left kind of an after taste, which I realized was the onions as they weren’t really cooked too hard when I ate the soup. I put the soup on the stove to let it heat all day, and later on had more soup. The soup color had turned to a nice brown color, which reminded me of my dad’s french onion soup, so I’m guessing the onions made the color. The onions, now properly cooked, made the soup taste even better, with no after taste now. And the fiddle heads and salmon were so good.
One thing I will do next time is chop up the fiddleheads a bit after boiling them, as they can be awkward to get on the spoon when they elongate from their curl in the soup. This is a good find for using fiddleheads, and the fiddleheads frozen raw, without blanching, were in great condition. I think they must be at least a year and a half old as I didn’t go get them this past summer.