The Magnificence

The Magnificence on a plate, with broccoli, and white wine sauce.. and riesling. Oooo, yeah.

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A few days ago I made a concerted effort to start rearranging my mind.

Having been through a period of excessive earthly gyrations coupled with extreme disruption of normality, living in a city that looks like a pile of bricks, in a neighbourhood that looks like a portaloo zoo, with a hurty back and no hot water and then being subjected to unrelenting media coverage of an even worse natural disaster with possible nuclear meltdown, I'd say that I'm not abnormal in finding my joie de vivre somewhat AWOL.

I've decided to take action. There is no point in surfing the net for hours, reinforcing the false idea that the world is falling apart. What use is it really to focus on these things until I get so down that I feel like crying and can't function? I had to give myself a talking to. Although there are terrible disasters happening, and although the last 6 months have been honestly horrendous, I'm actually ok. I will be ok and so will most of the world. In most places, today did not involve a natural disaster. It's time to get my mind set on the moving forward.

As my regular readers know, I've got a wide bloggy network of people that are into fitness and healthy living. One of my good friends, Kek, runs a forum, of which I am an administrator, although she should probably fire me for lack of actual.. um.. administration. There's a 40 day challenge going on over there, with various people signing up to get fitter, lose flab or whatever happens to be their current thing. I've committed myself to a positivity challenge to refocus my mind on positive habits and on 'the awesomeness', rather than 'the suck'.

I'm working on simple habits, like not drinking too much coffee, getting the orders out by 11.30am, catching up on study and mentally arguing back whenever pessimistic thoughts try to bring me down. There are, amongst the crappiness, some very cool things happening. For example, pre-quake, I would never have imagined asking my neighbour to come over for dinner, and yet, there we were, two nights ago, eating and laughing and getting to know each other. His lovely partner was having time out of the city with their baby and who could not be moved to action by the thought of a boy having to fend for himself for a whole week?

And then, yesterday, I got a message by Facebook from a fellow Christchurchian, to say that he had something for me. A special thing freshly caught from the Waimak. Behold, The Magnificence. I admit, probably not that photogenic, but beautiful to me.

Words can't really describe how awesome this gift is. For a start, you can't buy wild salmon in NZ. It's legal to catch it, but illegal to sell it, so the only way to get your hands on some is to befriend someone with a license to catch them. Or, you can buy imported salmon, but the price of it will make your wallet weep. I turned up at Kev the anglers house, marveled over the shiny coat of his fish-guts eating labrador and then let my jaw drop at the sheer glory of The Magnificence. It's massive. As you can see, it does not even even fit on my chopping block, and that is just one filet.

Not only is The Magnificence gorgeous, but also delicious beyond the level of any farmed salmon. There are many reasons to protect our wonderful New Zealand waterways and this is just one of them. It is naturally pink (unlike farmed salmon which is fed vitamins to try and replicate the colour of a wild salmon) and packed full of brain boosting, depression busting Omega 3's. You know how I feel about Omega 3's.. :) I loves them, in all their polyunsaturated wonderfulness.

Dinner was so very easy, as it usually is when you are working with a superior fresh food. I sliced a couple of steaks, removed the pin bones with tweezers, changing to pliers when they turned out to be resistant, then cooked the steaks in olive oil and butter (50:50) for just a few minutes each side until a lighter pink. I then removed the salmon from the pan and threw some crushed garlic, salt and white wine in there, swooshed it around, took it off the heat and added sour cream to make the sauce. All it needed then was a vege, a glass of reisling and a new episode of NCIS on the teev. I am revived.