The mantle of gloom over Wanaka last week has been replaced by a mantelpiece filled with dozens of rabbit skins and 120 beer bottles.
Since reporting on my sunless bad mood last Thursday, readers have inundated me with story ideas in the hope I will snap out of it.
Thank you. No, I can't believe it either that in these tight times I got a display photo and four columns devoted to my sad feelings and total lack of desire for canned tuna. But there you are.
Who cares? Well Edgewater Resort general manager Leigh Stock did, so he invited me to lunch.
"I can't believe you've spent 10 days without sun looking at a can of tuna in your drawer when you could have come here and had rabbit," Mr Stock said, pouring me a glass of beer from a bottle that had been, until he picked it up, sitting on a large block of oddly-shaped candle-lit ice wrapped in rabbit skin.
In a shamelessly orchestrated piece of restaurant theatre, waitress Jo entered stage right with a plate of hare and beer pie, smoked rabbit sausages and confit of rabbit leg and placed it on another rabbit skin spread out in front of me like it had been steam-rolled.
I ate it all before executive chef Damon McGinniss could get from the kitchen to the table.
Mr McGinniss has worked at Edgewater Resort for seven months, after seven years running his own restaurant in Rotorua.
He and wife Megan, son Harrison (3) and daughter Charlie (1) are absolutely loving Wanaka.
In April, he spent a month in Seoul, South Korea, working as guest chef at the five-star Intercontinental Hotel as part of a New Zealand Trade and Enterprise promotion.
There, he cooked with New Zealand beef and lamb, mussels, kiwifruit, honey, and Central Otago saffron.
He did not take Tarras rabbit and hare because it does not have an export market in Korea.
But Mr McGinniss believes, with education and promotion, there is great potential to expand the domestic market for this versatile meat.
Mr McGinniss has used about 200kg of Tarras rabbit and hare in the last month (one rabbit might weigh 1.7kg and a hare can weigh 2.5kg), cooking dishes as part of the two-month nationwide Monteith's Beer and Wild Food Challenge.
Every time the specialty is sold, another empty bottle of Dopplebock Winter Ale is placed on the restaurant mantelpiece.
"I had to use two ingredients from within 100km of the premises. Rabbit and hare came to mind straight away. We are not short of it and it's great eating," Mr McGinniss said.
At the moment, he is selling twice the volume of rabbit and hare, compared to beef or lamb, and is keen to keep up his contribution to pest eradication, should demand continue after the challenge finishes on July 26.
Mr Stock is thrilled with how well the dish has gone down.
"At the moment, it is all doom and gloom. But we can sell 120 rabbit meat meals when there's supposed to be nobody around," he said.
• In a change of format, the winner of this year's Monteith's Beer and Wild Food challenge will be decided by diner voting. Edgewater Resort's Wineglass Cafe is eighth on the leaderboard. Last year, Edgewater won the challenge's service award.
