One of Cookie's minions has a job at a traditional fishmongers. She has seen and tried a lot of things that are getting ever more adventurous, at least when it comes to "Neptune's realm". M wanted to help cookie with this task. We are all shy of eating things that we are not used to, so M decided to approach this task from outside the box.

Scary meat.



"When I was a kid, my family took me to visit the Durban Aquarium in South Africa. They had a shark tank. There was a viewing area next to the tank with thick glassed windows into the side of the tank. The inhabitants in the tank where on average 3 times bigger than me at the time. The rational part of me knew I had nothing to fear, because there was no way they could break through the glass (like the one did in "Jaws") and even if it did it would be too busy panicking like any fish out of water. But there a was a part of me that over-rode that rationality when one shark decided to swim straight towards me. I ran away from the window very fast. I sometimes use the shark tank as an analogy on when I approach something dangerous that I know or think is restricted from harming me. I don't care if people don't always understand what I mean by it. Just like when I say to someone "stop killing the cat."

SO I decided to eat shark. We sell shark steaks at our shop. The species is called Prionace Glauca, or in plain english a Blue Shark. A Blue shark is not dangerous to humans on its own, but where you unfortunate enough to end swimming in a school of them you would enjoy a fate not unlike the one that Bond villains wish on Bond. These sharks have been around for nearly 5 million years, but now their status according to IUCN is the category of "nearly threatened" thanks to human fishing habits. The sad thing is that they are mostly an unwanted by-catch that is not valued for their taste and ends up as fishmeal. Or in this case my plate.

I took some nice photos of the cooking process. But all those pictures got deleted when trying too free more space on my proper camera at Wee Little Snowman's Funeral. I had to almost give up on posting this task, until today I checked out what I had on my phone.

I cooked the shark steaks on a hot frying pan quickly, like I would cook tuna. Bit of pepper and salt and in olive oil. The shark skin looked cool. It had this cold grey pixelated shimmer to it, unlike any other fish I have seen. This reminded that these animals predate all mammal species like us and are about as alien as can be to me.

I didn't like the taste. My boyfriend loved it. The taste was rather bland, but it did have the musky tone to it that prominent predators have. When I thought I couldn't submit this praxis, someone suggested that I could buy shark steaks again, for the sake of completion. I decided that as much as it tempted me I wouldn't, because I did not enjoy the taste. In my mind it would be disrespectful, despite the shark being already dead, and not sharing any human sentiments like that, even when it was alive. "