Survival Cooking Part II

It is important to include vegetables in a healthy diet. These do not all have to be normal vegetables.

Sunday night I hit up Kroger after a parkour/acrobatics training session and acquired, among other things, nopales. Don't feel bad if you don't know what they are- even the guy at the register didn't know the name (a sure sign you're buying sufficiently unconventional food). Nopales are cactus leaves, typically incorporated into certain Mexican foods. Or, in our case, pasta sauce!

Recipe- buy a bunch of vegetables that sound good, tomato sauce, and an unusual ingredient, simmer well, and top with a weird cheese.

Thus, we had spinach and cactus pasta with goat cheese, a remarkably good dish with a lot of powerful, complementary tastes.

Note- these ingredients also make a great sandwich! It's just like swiss with lettuce and tomato, only goat cheese with cactus and spinach. :P

Survival Cooking Part I

So, serveries at Rice have been closed for almost 4 days now. This has provided the freedom to explore frontiers of food never before encountered by man. Not even kidding.

The first item on the list was DATREX multi-purpose emergency rations.

Each pack contains 72 hours worth of food, broken up into 18 individually wrapped bars of a questionable brown substance (flour, shortening, sugar, water, coconut, and salt, to be precise). These are designed to provide enough calories and nutrition to survive in low water environments (they have much less sodium than MREs or canned food). So great items to put on all your life rafts! They also remain safe to eat for at least 5 years. So, one giant case of these could survive long enough to feed you all through college!

When you crack open this vacuum sealed package, the smell of coconut will immediately begin to permeate the room. I advise storing DATREX in a ziplock bag after opening, unless you're really, really fond of smelling coconut, and nothing else, in your room.

After opening one of these beauties, you can bite into 200 calories worth of nondescript beige. The taste itself is relatively pleasant. It has the flavor and texture of a shortbread cookie, minus the Girl Scout touch. However, the aftertaste and general digestive sensation is not particularly enjoyable, and highly encourages eating DATREX in conjunction with another substance, to dilute it.

I personally would rather take my luck trying to catch sharks on a life raft rather than subsist on a diet of DATREX for 3 days. However, if you're just looking for a way to boost your caloric intake, I've discovered a few fun uses for it. It functions as a tasty ice cream mix-in, adding a nice crunchy texture, and effectively tripling the caloric value of a scoop of ice cream. A half-gallon of bluebell and DATREX could suddenly feed a small village. :) Other thoughts include using it as a pie crust, or else using it as a smoothie supplement.

Stay tuned for more cooking adventures with cactus and goat cheese, MREs, and more survival foods!

What happens when you give me free time

Watch out world, it's Spring Break!

Less than 24 hours in, and I've already accomplished goals and new adventures I would never have expected to pull off. Even better, it appears to be contagious. :)

Also, stand by for reviews of things like survival food sources, semi-illegal books, or parkour techniques!

Superficiality

Today, I got to deliver the message of the kids' skit summed up in one phrase- "God doesn't judge people by their outer appearance."

Sure, I was wearing robes, and telling small children about the importance of young David being picked as king, even though he was just a shepherd. But it's still highly significant, when you think about how much physical appearance matters in how we think of people.

Example 1) Celebrities (aka Daniel wants an excuse to put up a youtube video)

Celebrities are so often looked up to as being ideals for what we want to look like, or what social standards of beauty are. Say what you want to the contrary, if you've grown up watching television, you've been to some degree subconsciously programmed to have actors and models be the people by which you set standards for physical appearance.

I find this highly ironic in the digital age. Setting our standards based on people who we see pictures or videos of is skewed so much, because you can alter so much digitally. No really. Don't believe me on quite how much? Check this out- is this what you want your standard of real beauty based on? :)

Example 2) A Test Case

Now, wouldn't it be interesting if we could remove all physical traits that cause people to make judgements about us, and have everyone start on equal grounds? Well, that's never going to happen, and it's probably for the best. However, it is possible to temporarily remove a lot of those factors, with the help of some costuming.

Without admitting to anything, it's possible to take everything that factors in to how people assess you, and replace it with just the color orange. Place that single characteristic in a group of people that are all, say, dressed in white, and what happens? Lots of strong reactions. High fives, random greetings, taking pictures- limelight. Has this person done anything to merit attention, praise, or excitement from other people? Have they proven any inherent value that deserves this special treatment? Nope? All they've done is given someone an initial visual stimulus that triggers a reaction to judge based only on what they see.

Although, when what they see is a dancing orange man, you can't really blame them.

It's pretty cool.