*Pats tummy with satisfaction*

[logansrogue]

MMmmm. Mum made me steak for dinner tonight. Beautiful fillet kangaroo steak, flambe steak diane! *happy shudder* It lent itself beautifully to the garlic, actually. Enhanced the kangaroo flavour without making it seem gamey. Was rather a mushroomy taste, not a bad taste at all. (I don't mind the taste of mushrooms too much, just the texture). Blended really nicely with fresh parsley garnish. (I chomp down on parsley garnish, I know you're not supposed to but I fucking LOVE fresh parsley and would eat it by the bushel if I could!). Probably a placebo effect, but I feel so incredible now. Like my body is all "MEAT! REAL MEAT! Ohhhh this is GOOD meat! Meaty meaty meat! Lean, red and TASTY! Iron! Vitamins B! RAH!"

I thought I was going mad. I'd spoken to Karen (doctor_k) about how meat is important for B12 absorption and I was looking on the internet for some detailed information about that. God damn it, I could barely find anything for all the vegetarian pages! LOL! I finally found what I was after, though. I get really pissed off when some people go on about people not needing meat. This is just such a fallacy. We can *get by* without meat, but our bodies still need it to be in top condition. I know I couldn't get by without it. I wouldn't want to - that kangaro was tasty!

Anyhew, I'm going to go rest up for this weekend. I couldn't go to SwanCon tonight cause I got a headache :(. Hopefully I can go tomorrow! :)

Comments

[asweetdownfall.livejournal.com]

Man, that sounds too good.

Aww. If you do end up going...have a great time!

[groovekittie.livejournal.com]

I didn't even know you could eat kangaroo. lol I told my dad you were talking about how awesome it was and he said "Well, they're like rabbits, just bigger." lol He's silly.

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

Better than rabbits cause they're less cute and there's more to eat! :D

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

I actually don't like ostrich much! I've tried it and it doesn't do it for me. But kangaroo - mmm num num!

Yeah, me too. Probably because of my iron deficiency LOL!

[cedargrove.livejournal.com]

Can honestly say I've never had Kangaroo... but you make it sound so good.

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

It IS good! :)

[corglacier7.livejournal.com]

Heh, never had kangaroo steak. Here in the good ol' American midwest, it's all about the beef, or occasionally, buffalo/bison. Just had good beef steak tonight....mmm. I love using the grill now that I'm back home and the weather's good enough.

Well, listen to what your body's telling you. If you're craving red meat, there's probably a good reason. Particularly if you're a woman--so many women are afraid to eat red meat because of the fat content (never mind that we're supposed to have a little bit of chub rather than looking creepily like twelve-year old boys) but they could really use the iron it provides, plus the protein. Even the fats, if the meat's trimmed down a bit, are good--they're necessary for body maintenance.

I'm pretty sure I did my whole rant on the biological/paleontological evidence of humans as specifically engineered for omnivorous life a while ago on your journal, so you know my feelings on the idea that we're made to need meat. I've used that on militant vegetarians a few times, and they usually get all quiet.

Sorry, I just can't get all excited about tofu. ;-)

By the way, I love parsley too. That stuff's great.

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm with you there. We need some good red meat for our body and bones. I've been eating chicken a lot this week, too. Very tasty, my Mum is a genius with a lump of meat!

I actually *can* get excited about tofu, strangely enough. I really love the stuff! But that's just me isn't it? Can't choose a sex to stick to, can't stick to either meat or tofu. LOL!

Parsley is God's food!!

[corglacier7.livejournal.com]

I'm excited to be cooking again after three months at sea, so I'm all about the meat. My family loves it when I cook too.

Ah, well, I like my meat and I like men, so maybe there's some kind of deep symbolism with your choices in carnivorous situations and your choices in sex. (snicker)

Though really men are more trouble than they're worth at points. Not that I'd do any better with women; I'm not attracted to them, I talk more easily to men, and the cattiness women are capable of amazes me.

Damn, maybe we women all ought to just stick to a good vibrator...that's a very low-maintenance partner! :-D

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

You were at sea? My brain is saying, "She joined the Navy" but I don't know if it's right. Am I right?

Hahahaha, maybe. I've met a lot of red-meat eating lesbians, though. LOL!

Actually, I kind of avoid deep entanglements with women cause they are so complicated. It just screws with my head, having to deal with the mind games that go on. It's not a deliberate or malicious thing on the women's part - girls are just complicated. Men are kinda easier to figure out and if I'm with a man I can have the babies I wanted, so it's a matter of convenience rather than sexual desire. LOL!

Dude, right now, I AM sticking to a good vibrator. LOL!

[corglacier7.livejournal.com]

No, my knees are too shitty for the Navy, thanks to ice hockey.

After I graduated university in early '05 with my marine sciences degree, I went to work up in Alaska on the Bering Sea. I was a federal observer on the fishing fleet there (second largest fleet in the world), basically sailing on the boats for three months at a time and collecting the biological data of total catch, species in the catch, sex ratio, size, etc. to help manage the fisheries.

You probably don't get the show "Deadliest Catch" in Australia, but if it ever makes its way over, it's about crab fishermen on the Bering, and I was working in the same conditions on similar boats.

I'm probably done with that now that I'm going for my master's degree in oceanography come fall, but I'm sticking to studying fish. So who knows, maybe I'll make it to Australia some day!

Don't know what you get in the way of fish down there, but if you get Pacific cod or most any kind of sole or flounder, chances are it's from the Bering Sea.

Women are masters of the whole mind-fuck game. Men aren't easy to figure out, but by God it's easy to mess with their heads...!

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'll have a search for it to see what you're doing. Of course. Marine Biology! I should have remembered that! *smacks self* If you do make it to Australia, lemme know. If you're popping by Fremantle, I live fifteen to twenty minutes drive from there so I can easily say hi! (Fremantle is a pretty big port over here so it wouldnt' be surprising if you did ever stop here).

Oh, how are the numbers up in the Pacific? Cause I worry about the environment a lot and I'm hoping that there's plenty for the animals to eat up there.

There's heaps of fish down here. Herring, salmon, snapper (a very popular fish here is snapper), shark (another much eaten fish), black sole, trevally, rock cod. Actually, here:

http://www.amonline.net.au/fishes/fishfacts/specomm.htm

That's our fish. LOL. Lots of them! Bounteous seas here in Australia. :) We get humpback whales off the west coast during certain times of the year, too! :D

[corglacier7.livejournal.com]

Well, take the show with a grain of salt since "Deadliest Catch" is television, and with that automatically comes that it's overdramatized and not fully representative of the day-to-day. My experiences were pretty ordinary--you get so into the 24/7 routine that the men literally lose track of the days. I only could tell them because I had to daily fill out forms about my data, and they always were dated. Otherwise, hell, I'd have had no clue either.

The fish numbers up there are excellent. Serious commercial fishing in the Bering Sea is only about 20 to 30 years old, so it's never really been off the radar for environmental consciousness. After the irreversible disaster in the Atlantic that the North American and European nations had caused, the US basically said, "Won't happen up in Alaska" when they set up quotas and such.

Quotas are deliberately small compared to the amount of fish out there, and all the boats carry observers like me at least at some point (small boats 1/3 of the time, big ones always) to collect the data to assess the health of the fish stocks and manage the quota for coming years.

It's one of the most productive fisheries in the world. To give you some idea, by far the largest fishery there is that of walleye pollock. One pollock factory boat can haul a net of 100 metric tons of fish probably twice or three times a day. Multiply that by the 20 pollock factory boats that are licensed in the Bering Sea, working 7 days a week, for seven to eight months of the year. Juggle that math around a bit, and then keep in mind that's just scratching the surface of the total pollock out there.

So yes, there're huge stocks, and to protect that, it's deliberately one of the best and most tightly managed fisheries out there. It's always in change to improve more as well. For example, next year's A-season (Jan to April), new and stricter regulations come into play for the sole and flounder trawl fleet as to requiring them to keep and utilize a greater percent of their incidental bycatch fish to reduce the waste.

I read a book by a British journalist called "End of the Line" and was pretty appalled by the lousy management of so many other fisheries, or the fact that some British fishermen are still illegally fishing the Atlantic cod and just saying they don't give a fuck that the species is nearly extinct.

Europe is still increasing quotas of overfished stocks, not to mention that with their native waters depleted, they've moved on to exploiting Africa's coastal waters for their fish for pennies on the dollar payment to the native government in a horrible kind of neo-colonialism--and of course that's another enviromental disaster waiting to happen besides.

So as I constantly hear how bad we supposedly are in environmentalism, fisheries is one area where I am proud to say that America is far, far ahead of Europe.

OK, getting off my soapbox now!

As for whales, while I was up there I saw orcas, bowheads, a fin whale, and a humpback. There're many others too. I also got to see various kinds of seals and sea lions when we were fishing up in the Arctic ice pack edge, which was pretty cool.

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

Oh wow! You had a totally exciting job! I love hearing and reading about that sort of thing, your comment was a very interesting read for me! I'm really glad to hear that somewhere in the world they're taking care of their fishies! I couldn't tell you how Australia does cause I honestly have no idea. I do know that we get mad at a couple of SE Asian countries for coming into our sea and fishing our fish, though I don't know any of the specifics at all.

God, I'd so love to see a whale. I've seen sea lions before cause we have them living on a small island here in Perth. It's called Carnak Island and it's like a sea lion bachelor getaway! All the boys lie on the beach and hang out and eat fish! :D They also come up to boats and have a good look at you. While they're in a lazy mood you can get rather close to them to take photos. But those fuckers move faster than you'd think on land, it's quite scary. Me and my Uncle had one surprise us when we were looking around a grotto. We were pinned two ways with sea lions and we busted our asses down the beach, screaming like girls (then pissing ourselves laughing). I'm sure the sea lions were like, "Huh? Fucking tourists!" hehehe.

We also get rays up and down the coast! I really love rays and skates and little sharks. I find them really fascinating cause they're so different to most fish. I remember once I was standing on a reef rock down south, watching all these rays swim around in the water really gracefully - about two or three different species as well!

[corglacier7.livejournal.com]

Australia...I know you have problems with international fish pirates of sorts running around and nicking fish from the Antarctic toothfish fishery, regulations and enviromental precautions be damned. There was one incident a while back, if I remember, of an Aussie boat literally chasing a Uruguayan pirate fisher over a thousand miles across the Pacific.

I'm pretty sure your actual territorial waters fisheries are mainly orange roughy, tuna, and billfish. Those are tough ones to have as your native stocks. Roughy bears close watching as it's a slow-growing fish that reproduces in low numbers, and the large tuna because of the obscene prices the Japanese will pay for one fish there's so much incentive to exhaust an already overfished quota.

It looks from what little I know that Australia tries its best to manage their fisheries--unlike the fat cats from the industry who basically run the "fisheries council" in Europe--but Asian and South American fish pirates are a problem.

However, I always give props to Australia for the establishment of large marine reserves and "parks". You and NZ were ahead of the curve on that.

Ah, the mammals. They were pretty hilarious to watch out on the ice. And I've heard a couple stories about huge sea lions gallumphing their way up the stern trawl ramps of boats, either out of sheer curiosity or to escape the orcas. They then go chasing around deck--even into the living quarters in one case when a guy woke up to find one in his room. The guys get out of the way fast in that case...an 80 kilo or so man vs a 900 kilo Stellar sea lion is not a fair contest.

Skates are pretty neat. I'm kind of fond of flatfish myself, just because they're so strange. I rather like the Pacific halibut. After a few months as a little normal fish-looking larvae, it starts to flatten out and gets both eyes on one side of its head. Then it grows up, and while the males stop at about 1 meter in length and die around age 20, the females can live to 40 or so, and get almost to 3 meters and about 300 kilos. The big "barndoor" females are also the halibut renowned for their strength, smarts, and putting up a hell of a fight with sport fishermen.

So, those ladies go through a juvenile body image crisis of sorts, and end up being the large, strong, long-lived, and very respected members of their species. (snerk) If young girls were ever willing to use a bizarre-looking fish as a role model...

http://www.afsc.noaa.gov/RACE/behavioral/halibut_fbe.htm

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

Sea lions are a freakin' crack up. I loved watching them from the boat. Though ours were pretty sedate as they were there to lie around and be fat and lazy. LOL. I should get some photos off an old disk I have of this particular sea lion. He was SO funny. He decided that it was time to go in the water. He was lying on his tummy, his body running parallel to the shore. Of course, he wasn't going to waste valuable energy getting UP or anything. Nope. He just slowly, REALLY slowly, starts rolling on his side, down into the water. After a minute he makes it into the water and just lies there as the waves slosh over him. I think he got hot and was cooling himself off. LOL!

Australia has a lot of ad campaigns for sensible fishing, actually. There are a lot of ads on from Fisheries telling people to be careful about how many fishes they catch.

Oh, flatfish are AWESOME. I remember reading about them when I was a kid and being utterly fascinated by the transformation they went through. I didn't realise they got so big, though! Holy shit, that thing is HUGE!

[corglacier7.livejournal.com]

I also have a plush halibut like this as a "mascot" of sorts. ;-)

http://www.tableandhome.com/prodhcgge

Hurray for all the strange-looking fish of the world! Hopefully I'll have the chance to work more with them in years to come.