Cheaters may never win... - Days 18 & 19

...but they sure do finish 30-day blog challenges in less then 90 days.

Tonight we combo up and speed through some of the murk and muck (is that a thing?).

Day 18: Favorite place to eat

Well, let's be honest, I love eating anywhere I don't have to do the cleaning. So I guess I'll pick a KC favorite: Grinders. They make an amazing Philly Cheese Steak Sandwich (I like mine with banana peppers, mushrooms and both kinds of cheese - provolone and cheese wiz).

You can also order a New York Style Chili Bomb Pie, which is a pizza of your choice with tots, chili-cheese and scallions plopped on the center of your pie. It looks and sounds more disgusting than it tastes. That being said, I don't have the kahones to order this myself, I just sponge a bite off someone else.

I'm also pretty sure there was one night, when Aisha and I were on the verge of being over-served and under-feed, where we had the funky dough and it came directly from heaven. DEEEE-LICIOUS.

To wash it all down they have about a million beers.

So, come see me sometime and we'll go eat there.



Day 19: Something you miss

In general, being a kid. I don't necessarily pine to relive any stage of life, I just miss being carefree and blissfully obvious to "real life."

More specifically, I miss staying with my grandparents when Mom and Dad went away for a weekend.

I loved staying at Grandpa Joe and Grandma Jeannie's house. I always got to stay in the back bedroom across from their room where the fancy smell-good powder for "powdering your nose" was. Along with a dresser full of Archie comic books that I read at night.

Grandma would always have some kind of cookies in the third drawer of the kitchen and make real fried chicken. Grandpa would play Slap Jack with me and act like I hurt him when I hit his hands. When we'd go driving, they let me sit in the middle between them and if I asked Grandpa to drive fast, he'd pull his hat down real low in front and make "fast car sounds" and act like he was steering an out-of-control vehicle. I'm not even doing it justice, but at the time (and still now, in my mind) it was the funniest thing ever. He probably never really went any faster, it just made me drunk with power :)

Staying with Grandma Jane and Vic was a different kind of fun. Probably because being with each other was less of a novelty since they only lived about 15 minutes from my house, we talked almost everyday and they lived on an actual working farm where there were daily chores.

I was even less into manual labor then than I am now, so I could usually complain/whine my way out of doing actual outside work. Although, I always liked watching them feed calves, especially when some were bottle fed. That is something every little kid should get to do.

But like I said, I could get out of outside work (let's be honest, a bored 10 year-old with an affinity for daydreaming would probably just be in the way of any actual real work getting done anyhow) and help Grandma make lunch and supper for the boys. I loved cooking with grandma, I'm not really sure why, but I liked it. There was also the extra bonus of getting to watch Days of Our Lives with her after lunch. Mom didn't approve of me watching "that trash", but grandma always let me watch with her. I think that's what made it so fun. When I was in college she would call me for updates if she missed a few days.

I also now have a piece of my childhood memories from the farm in my own house. It's a copper garage with moving car music box that plays "King of the Road" as it circles the building. I used to play that thing all the time when I was out there and that song always makes me think of the farm and Grandma Jane.

Pigs don't fly for a reason

And that reason is?

If they did, bacon and sausage would taste disgusting.

For nearly half a decade I've been convinced that turkey bacon tastes good. I don't know what kind of turkey bacon I had when I thought it tasted good, but I can say, without doubt, that I was wrong.

From time to time I've substituted ground turkey for ground beef in recipes like tacos or spaghetti meat sauce and it's tasted pretty good. So, a few weeks ago I thought I'd give turkey sausage breakfast links a try. Uhhh, barf. I couldn't even eat two links doused in mustard it was so gross. I had to throw the rest away.

This morning when I went grocery shopping, I wanted bacon, but in an attempt to be healthier, I picked up some Jeannie O turkey bacon. Umm...first of all, it doesn't fry crispy like real bacon at all and it tastes like really bad fried light bologna. And to top that off, they consider one slice a serving. If it even tasted a little bit like real bacon that would be a problem, because nobody can eat just one slice of real bacon. Ugh, but this crap, no problem. I only "fried" up like 6 slices and the rest went back in the fridge. I'm going to see if I can pawn the rest off on some schmuck at work.

So in summation, turkeys can't intimidate pigs, long live real artery clogging bacon!

You're no good, you're no good, you're no good, eggy you're no good.

More than once now I have had a conversation with my co-worker about eggs and how long you should keep them. This conversation was revisited today when I said, "I had eggs in my refrigerator and I couldn't remember when I bought them so I looked for an expiration date on the carton and it only had a sell by date. How long would you say it's safe to use eggs after the sell by date?" Her response, "Oh, I wouldn't say more then a day or two." Which was apparently blasphemous to me, "WHAT!?! Two days? I was thinking a MONTH!"

Clearly, her and I have very different views on the life expectancy of food.

A third co-worker joined in the conversation and took the middle of the road answer saying "two weeks." She then added that there is some sort of water test you can used on your eggs to see if they are fresh or not. So I looked it up and decided to preform the test at home, because I still had the old carton of eggs in my refrigerator.

So here is the carton with the sell by date.

Here is an egg from that carton, clearly floating...egg fail. Verdict = rotten.

So now we know two months out from a sell by date is too long.

Then for kicks I thought I would try an egg from the new carton that I bought last night with a sell by date of June 9.

Schwoo...it sunk and rested horizontally. That would have been a disaster if I had gotten a different result.

So, what is the moral of today's blog? Don't print the stupid sell by date on food, I don't care when it's suppose to be sold by, I want to know on what day eating this food will make me vomit!

It's like walking on hot coals, except you eat them

I have several interests including, but not limited to:

• confidently making up answers to questions I don't know the real answer to to see if anyone believes me,
• storytelling,
• making people laugh and
• putting people up to challenges. Seemingly the majority of these challenges involve food or eating things, like pet fish.

My latest food challenge involved my boss and Buffalo Wild Wings' "Blazin' Wing Challenge." My boss, Cindy, is from Texas and loves hot, spicy food. If we go to a mexican restaurant she asks them to bring the hottest salsa out and I'm pretty sure she eats jalapenos like most people eat carrots. It's awesome.

So sometime this past summer it came up that she always ordered the wing sauce one notch lower than the hottest at BWW. We will now switch to a dialog format to really make you feel like you were there.

Erin: "Well, if you can do that one, you should totally do the Blazin' Wing Challenge."

Cindy: "What's that?"

Erin: "You have to eat something like 12 wings with the Blazin' wing sauce in 6 minutes"

Cindy: "Oh, easy I could do that."

Erin: "Ok, that's what I want to do for my birthday lunch next year. Please!?!?! You can spend your maternity leave training for it if you need to."

Cindy: "Alright, I'll do it."

Erin: "SERIOUSLY!?! I can't for my birthday now!"

Skip ahead 6 or so odd months later and it's time for my birthday lunch at work.

The task: Eat 12 traditional wings with the Blazin' wing sauce in 6 minutes. You have to get all the meat off the bone, but not the "gristle or cartilage" (I really am quoting there, the word cartilage make me gag so I wouldn't voluntarily use it). You cannot use any dressing, eat anything else, like fries, you cannot drink and you cannot wipe your face or hands.

Here Cindy is with her 12 wings. She made all of us smell the wings so we could sort of know what she was going to be enduring.

Here is Dave, the Regional Training Manager, announcing over the sound system that she was doing the challenge.

The first wing.

We negotiated the photos that would be taken. We could capture the first wing and at the end, but nothing in between. I also feel it's important to mention I offered her my hair band to pull her hair back, but she scoffed saying, "I'm not going to have this all over my face, amateur. I'm going to be very dainty."

And she was! Look at that, no sauce on her face. I get sauce on my ear just when I'm eating wings at a normal pace, let a lone 12 in 6 minutes!

But I digress...did she conquer the challenge or not?!!?

She nailed it in a time of 5 minutes 58 seconds.

Bravo, Boss Lady!

And if any of you readers out there are inspired now to do this challenge please do and report back. There was one guy who apparently did the challenge in 56 seconds and I'm not entirely sure how that is humanly possible.

The Great Nutella Challenge

Here at unfiltered nonsense we pride ourselves on quality conversations and debating the real facts of life. Recently, I blogged about entering a sweepstakes to win a case of Nutella as a favor to my friend Amanda. Well, my friends, that particular blog spurred a frenzy of activity with no fewer than three friends coming to the defense of Nutella saying it was a delicious treat.

Always trying to broaden my horizons, Becca threw down "The Great Nutella Challenge," try Nutella and report back.

Obstacle #1

Find Nutella in the grocery store. My usual grocery store, The Neighborhood Wal-mart, did not carry it. Luckily, this past weekend I was back home and found a small jar in a Super Wal-mart in Colby, KS.

Obstacle #2

Remember to take the Nutella back to KC with me when I left home. Fail. When I called Mom and told her to try the stuff for me and report her findings, she passed. Apparently, we Garretts like to judge food by it's cover. A 40-50 car pileup on I-70 deterred me from stopping at a grocery store on my way home Sunday night. (Fear not I was not involved in the accident, but it took me 45 minutes to go 4 miles, 5 hours after the initial pileup happen).

Obstacle #3

Try to find Nutella again, this time at Price Chopper. At first look there was no Nutella, but in what could only be described as God's answer to someone's prayers, I looked to the very back of the shelving and in the far back, an entire arms-length reach away from me, was one last jar of Nutella.

I cut up a banana, per Becca's recommendations, and took my first bite of Nutella. Amanda suggested I just eat it by the spoonful, but I wasn't that brave.

(real quick unrelated note, I found out my camera has a "food" setting and I can't wait to take more pictures of food now)

Final verdict?

One thumb up because the other one had to hold the camera. Nutella is surprisingly delicious and wildly bad for you. Seriously! In a 2 tablespoon serving size there are 200 calories and 100 of those are from fat. So eat up friends, but please do so in moderation, you could tub up real fast.