Last Day: Clearing the Remains

Posted by Logan

Indian food for breakfast?

Microwaved Indian food for breakfast?

Expired microwaved Indian food for breakfast?

Creamy Rice tastes a lot like pudding added to Ricies.

Had I not been a little fearful of it, it would have made a much better breakfast.

The second box of Indian food was, sadly, inedible.
I mean, just look at it. Then add greenness and gloppiness.

Finally, prunes. The first one was pretty good. The rest were almost tasteless.









I finished the week with a Cuban cigar, a Montecristo. I figured I deserved it.

Day Seven: Mufasa and Malaysian cats

Posted by Logan

I skipped the tea today. After the first few days they didn't taste very good, and I'm punishing myself enough with other things.

I skipped breakfast entirely, in fact, and had a lunch of Eastern European lasagne called Mufasa or something, and an elderberry drink.

 

Elderberries. They're what your father smells of.

 

Rice stick noodles don't need to be cooked; they seem to be ready to eat after having boiling water poured over them.

Sadly they don't taste of anything and congeal if not saturated in soup, so I ate them in a clump and it was pretty hard going.

I looked at the catalogue of misery that was my remaining food, and took a trip to the Chinese store down on Beach St.

These are blueberry layer cakes.

This is a yoghurt drink with, apparently, fruit.

If you're asking yourself, do those Malaysian prawn-flavoured tubular snacks feature a pink kitten playing a guitar? then you can safely answer No. The kitten is cross-eyed and is simply holding the guitar, and seems to be making no attempt to play it.

I had a look at the ingredients list, and it seems unlikely that either kittens or guitars were harmed in the manufacture of this snack. What suffered a major blow, however, was my confidence in Malaysian cuisine. The prawn flavouring was extremely persistent, lasting hours after the final Snek Perisa Udang was gone.

Day Six: Hot Hot Ow

Posted by Logan

 

My day began with a different Korean treat. This one turned out to be a chocolate-covered cookies-and-cream ice cream bar, which at 80c has got to be the best buy I've made this week.

The latest in my series of teas (which I'm beginning to regret) is a Formosa Oolong. It was extremely similar to regular tea.

Speaking of regrets, for lunch I had Beef Vindaloo. Seeing it there beside the other Indian options at the food court servery, I wondered why I had never tried it before.

My first bite sounded a minor alarm in my head, but my second confirmed it; I had not eaten Vindaloo before because it was extremely spicy. My eyes watered, my throat ached, and my eyes darted around for some way to relieve the pain.

I scoured the cafe menu for a drink... but it had to be a drink I had never goddamn had before. I chose a Dutch coffee, extra milk. Fortunately it came with a minaret of whipped cream which I shovelled into my mouth with a breadknife. Ah, blessed relief.

I then finished the Vindaloo, as no food gets the better of me. Not this week.

These are... peas?

They're covered in... yoghurt?

They're from... China?

One flavour masked another. A most mysterious dish.

Lebanese bread. Actually quite a lot of it.

A surprisingly delicious non-alcoholic beer that tastes of apples.

Day 5: Koreans, Crabs, Organics, Indians

A much smaller can of what appeared to be coffee gave me the fortitude to open a frozen packet of what actually was a Korean popsicle. After that, the bunch of circus-midget bananas was easy. Happily, they tasted better than regular-sized bananas.

The tea was bad. It was called Lapsang Sontag or something, and tasted the way a feminist watching a beauty pageant feels.

When I saw bags of Tam Tam for sale, my eye was immediately drawn to the tagline, "Crab Flavored Snack."
This is an idle boast. If it were 100% accurate, the tiny chips would be inedible. Because they taste only vaguely like crab, they are delicious.

Did you know that organic cola existed? Well, here it is. It has none of the crispness, the tang, of regular cola, and is smooth and sweet, much like a forgotten bottle of Soda Stream you found in the back of the cupboard.

I can't imagine that the wild and woolly proponents of organic food would have much of a hankering for cola, which may explain why I've never seen this before in my life.


 

I found this pack at the local Indian food store. As I can't read the language, going by the imagery I can only assume that it is intended to induce vivid hallucinations in children.
I purchased it immediately.

I pulled one of the flat discs out and gingerly tasted it. Not only was it disgusting, it also stuck to every part of my mouth and, coughing and spluttering, I removed it with a toothbrush and what must have been upwards of two litres of water.
Anything that harms me must be destroyed with fire. I put the next disc in a pan with hot oil, and it bubbled and coalesced into a recognizable form: a papadom. The packet only says "PAPAD" — I guess, in the Indian tradition, you must bring your own OM.

I had six, with sauce to mask the texture, which was that of extremely old documents.

A Poem Celebrating Couscous

Posted by Logan, with apologies to Sir Mix-A-Lot.

I like couscous and I cannot lie
I smother it on my French fries
When it goes in with a slightly bitter taste
and a mound of curry paste
on my tongue, wanna put it in fluffed
'cause it goes with a pepper that's stuffed
My eyes are watering, my vision's blurring
'Cos I'm cooking and I can't stop stirring
Oh, couscous, I wanna stew with ya
and post online pictures
My grandma tried to warn me
But semolina wheat is just so corny.
So, sous chef! Or baker! Has your kitchen got the cous?
'Cos you can braise it! Brown it! Blanche it! Broil it! Bake that healthy cous!

Beans on Toast

Posted by Brody


Toast. Borlotti beans in slimy brine. Never again.

Day 4: Foods of the World

Cranberry juice tastes bittersweet, like crabapples. The pack was mysteriously open when I got to it. I had horrible visions of homeless people wandering through a supermarket taking sips from various containers and putting them back on the shelf. Fortunately it was not a hobo, but a flatmate who had tired of his own weird drinks who had dilapidated my beverage.

Tea today was a grainy, oily blend that tasted like someone's nose. The name is unreadable.

I have never much cared for seafood, so what prompted me to buy not one but two packs of shrimp-flavoured crackers is beyond me. The smell was overpowering, the taste unassuming.

Coffee sometimes comes in a can. I purchased this can on the assumption that it was coffee. It turned out to be coffee, and I was happy. Despite the large 'x2' at the bottom, it was only one coffee, and there didn't appear to be anything else, or two of anything else, inside.

From the oriental to the occidental, Oreos are an American biscuit/cookie with some kind of confection inside. They were unsurprising in taste, but small in size. They vanished into my gaping maw in the twinkling of an eye.

Dinner brought me to a North African restaurant on Albert St. Brody and I had couscous and lamb (meat)balls respectively, and peppermint tea and dukkah collectively. The dukkah, shown here, was essentially bread dipped in oil dipped in ground-up nutty and seasony things. It was very good, as was the tea, which had—if my palate has not been destroyed by years of soda and sandwiches—honey in it.

I imparted upon my stomach a final indignity of this unholy trifecta. The Korean mango drink had most certainly been sweetened.
The globule of grey had beans in it; they were somewhere in the bean scale between coffee beans and extremely dark peas, which aren't beans at all, which says something about my confidence in this as a food product.
The 50-50 Maska Chaska pack bore the subtitle,"TASTY - TASTY BISCUITS". This was approximately 25% correct. They were crackers with green things in them that I could not pick from the 25 ingredients. They were not Milk Powder (From Cow &/Or Buffalo) or Bacterial Protease. I hope, for all our sakes, that bacteria has not developed to the point of professional teasing, but if they were doing so in these crackers, they were extremely casual about it.

Day 3: Cheese and Chinese

Breakfast today was a wheel of cheese.
The Laughing Cow is clearly laughing at anyone willing to eat paprika-flavoured cheese. The other three flavours were good, however, and the triangular foil-wrapped pieces reminded me of packed school lunches.

My tea was 'Pamplepinge'? and Apple Oolong. The tea leaves themselves have a heady citrus fragrance, and there are dried orangey bits. The steeped tea was less powerful.

Lunch consisted of various buns from the Chinese cake shop on Lorne St by Victoria.
The first one had purple inside it. I have no idea what it was, except that it was purple. The others were soft and strongly flavoured, but not particularly memorable.

I bought this 'rice cake' from a Chinese store. It was five short batons of ricey stuff.

I had no clue how to prepare it, so I sliced it julienne and fried the first baton. It burned a little but ended up tasting a bit like damper.
The second baton I cut into short cylinders and boiled with salt and then reduced with chicken stock. It was squidgy, like tofu.
The third stick went in the microwave. After it came out I tried cutting it with a knife, scissors, stabbing it with a fork, prying it apart... nothing. I knawed on the end for a while but it was a hopeless case.
The remaining two bars? I don't know yet. Maybe I'll boil then fry them, then put them in the microwave without turning it on just to wear down their resolve. Then throw them away, because ha ha rice cakes, I fooled you both.

In the spirit of trying new things, I bought a Sunday paper. And read it. All the way through.
It was awful. Or perhaps it represented true blue, hardworking New Zealand, and I'm awful. Either way, I won't be doing it again.

Day 2: Clown cereal

Posted by Logan

I began my day, as so many do, with tiny sugar-encrusted corn balls. After I added milk, the bowl looked like a New Orleans McDonald's ball pit after Hurricane Katrina.

The flavour was nowhere near as sweet as I had expected for a product that was 50% sugar. I ground my way through the bowl and was rewarded with a sugar headache.

This did not prevent me from having more while watching the rugby.

Yesterday I went to a tea and coffee store and picked up seven varities of tea I'd never had before. This, according to the handwritten description, is Ceylon Dynoolse. Or Dynamite. I'm no good at reading cursive.

I've had several cups today and it is good, if a little mild.

These Chinese treats were bought sight unseen from a place in Newmarket. Labelled only 'Haw Flakes', I was delighted to discover they were thin discs that tasted of strawberry.

Poppa Jacks are bags that I've seen all my life, but not once have I been tempted to buy them, partly because I had no idea what they looked or tasted like.

They're just like ETA Munchos, which are now called Stabs or something.

So that was disappointing.

Last night, besides the rock candy, I had some cherry cola, a Melting Moment biscuit, and a pack of Japanese chocolate things with pandas stamped on them that tasted considerably worse when zapped with an industrial laser.

BONUS PICTURES

 

Making candyfloss the hard way

Posted by Logan

 The Blackpool Rock candy I had for dinner was difficult to chew. 

Fortunately there were a number of options available to me. 

In the video:

• Industrial laser
• Bandsaw
• Drop saw
• Grinder
• Dremel with spinning blade made of copy paper

Spamwich

Posted by Brody

After finishing the last challenge I went out and bought all the stuff I missed, and a bunch of stuff I'd never eaten for the next challenge (I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out which). Yes, all of this did cost more than I spent on food during the previous challenge. A lot more.

















For a time it was good. I had fruit, wine, tea, coffee, cheese, bread, and fresh vegetables. But it came time to embark on the next culinary caper, and much sooner than I was happy about I was getting to know a spamwich -- a spam sandwich:












Probably better that you can't see the contents. Just imagine what your cat eats, and be glad you're eating neither.

The Rules

Posted by Logan

1. Food eaten must be, to the best of one's recollection, food you have never eaten before.
2. Exception One: 'enabling food'; cereal requires milk, Indian food requires rice, and so on.
3. Exception Two: you may eat more than one serving of a new food if it is the same day.
4. Food eaten must be in the spirit of Trying New Stuff.
5. The week begins at 6pm, Friday 09 July, and ends at 6pm, Friday 16 July.

Gentlemen, start your Delhi bellies.