Day 15: Try Tofu

     I found myself strolling through the isles of the Pacific Ocean Market with my brother earlier today. Its a heavily oriental influenced market place where everything is in Japanese (or Chinese or some other language, I have no idea, sorry). Its a very interesting market, filled with strange aromas and of coarse, suspended carcases of dead animals. The glass casing with all of the iced fish heads was a favorite for my brother. I was there because I assumed that a store as bizzare as that would surely hold some "new thing" potential. I figured that I would eat a brain or something just as absurd. But, I had no idea how to spell brain (still don't) in whatever language this marketplace had adopted, and I didn't want to eat brain bad enough to ask any employees. So, I did the next best thing, I bought some tofu. It may not be as interesting as brains, but its new just the same. Plus I think that I owe it to my stomach to fill it with something other than peeps.

     So I got the tofu and I looked up a video on how to make a tofu meal. The meal in the video was garnished with exotic spices and bases and looked pretty appetizing. From there, I figured that since I don't have any of those obscure sounding flavor intensifiers (probably because I'm not vegan {or even vegetarian for that matter}), I decided to to simply eyeball it and do my best to throw in whatever scarce ingredients were left in the fridge. This is a big step for me, actually using my gut instinct on cooking a meal. I mean, I had a goal last week where I just cooked burritos for my family and I felt a little out of my environment on that, so imagine how unprepared I felt about "eyeballing" on a project like this. So I followed what little instructions I could from the video and heated up some oil, diced the tofu and cook until it started to brown. Thats about when I looked towards the fridge and cupboard for flavor inspiration. I rummaged through for a while and picked out some things like sea salt, balsamic vinegar, Frank's Read Hot (hot sauce), garlic spice and pepper. I threw a "dash" (however much that is) of this and a "pinch" (see last use of parentheses) of that in, and then proceeded to pour way too much balsamic in. Things were looking good, the tofu was soaking up the delicious juices, the aroma was pleasant and I was fairly appetized. By now the experiment was done cooking but before I tried my creation, I set up a control. I saved a couple pieces of raw tofu that I was going to use to gauge how much better or how much worse my version of cooking with tofu turned out to be. I gave a piece to myself, brother and dad for us to try. My dad described it as "kind of indescribable". It didn't really have a taste, just a tasteless cube of mush. So we tried my version which looked and smelled pretty good (just sayin'). It was defiantly describable, just not by much. Basically, it just tasted like sea salt and hot sauce and garlic spice and pepper (which is not that bad at all). That wasn't the only taste but those were the most apparent. So the conclusion: we all decided that tofu isn't really that great but at least my cooked version of it is (by a mild margin) better then it's raw counterpart. I do plan on trying a real dish of tofu sometime though, ya know, with all that broccoli and what not.

Tofu: "Its pretty alright"

Day 13: Peep Challenge

     I never liked peeps. You know, those colorful little seasonal marshmallow easter treats? Its a sugar-coated-self-induced-diabetes-snack.Well, I told my friend (Mouse) about the peep challenge on a road trip a couple years ago and convinced him to try it.

     The Peeps Challenge: Simple, just eat 12 innocent peeps in 3 minutes, no water or puking.

     So I completely failed my last edible challenge (cracker and bread challenges) and I wasn't about to let this one defeat me. I (again) was pretty confident that I would utterly destroy this challenge, which (again) was a bad idea. I'm slowly figuring out that these over simplistic challenges are sometimes the hardest ones to complete unscathed. I know all too well the consequences of the last edible challenges (a night hunched over the toilet, hawking my guts out). Mental note: Stop being overly confident towards challenges that seem simple but involve food, and stop puking afterwards. I had the challenge and I was building my confidence the throughout the entire trip to the grocery store. Once I had the two boxes, I began to visually strategize my approach. They didn't have the original duck shaped peeps, so the heart shaped ones (I'd argue that the hearts were way bigger than the ducks and I should be given a medal for trying such an intimidating and potential harmful task) would have to do. The clock was set for 3 minutes and the wrappers were off the boxes in hopes of shedding a few seconds off of my time. The countdown started and I ignited with intensity. I tore through the first three with no signs of slowing down. Peep number four is the one that really slowed me down a bit. It had been a mere 50 seconds in and my stomach was already trying to take over the autopilot. After a bit of work, I took down the fifth and went for the first half of number six. By now it was a good minute an a half in and I was not feeling great. I imagine that when that amount of sugar hits your body at once your stomach is just awestruck at the complete disregard you have for it. I barely managed to get the first half consumed when the clock hit two minutes. By now I knew it was over. I was barely half way to my target when hurling seemed like a pretty reasonable option. I stopped before the time ran out and before I could dare finish number six out of respect for the well being of my body. I failed the challenge and developed a minor stomach ache but I got a taste (pun) of what professional eaters have to deal with. And I still hate peeps.

    The aftermath of the heart shaped peep feast. 

Day 10: Edible Challenges

Its safe to say that the edible challenges were not, I repeat, were NOT a good idea. I was at work last night trying to think up my new thing for the day and I came to the conclusion that the "saltine challenge" and the "bread challenge" were O.K. to try.

Saltine Challenge: Eat 6 crackers in 60 seconds without the help of water.

Bread Challenge: Eat one slice of bread in 45 seconds without the help of water.

Seems easy right? Wrong. I felt confident before my attempt, I almost thought that the challenges were going to be too easy to count. I mean, Thats ten seconds for each cracker, this was going to be a cake walk I thought. 15 seconds and half a cracker into the challenge, I knew that I greatly underestimated the power of the dry saltiness of the saltine. At around 40 seconds I had two crackers down and it was apparent that my failure was secure. In a last ditch effort, I crammed the last of the crackers in my mouth, but that was futile, I had lost the challenge. The bread challenge ended up, for the most part, the same way. Although I was closer with the second challenge, I still lost.

Losing sucks and all, but its not as bad as barfing periodically throughout the entire night (which is how I spent my night). I felt terrible and couldn't sleep. I cant say for sure if it really was the edible challenges that caused me to hurl, but it is enough proof for me to not ever do either of those challenges again.