That is about to change. 4 years later, I'm revisiting one of my favorite projects.... the World Cup Eating Challenge! I started this for the 2014 World Cup and loved it. The idea was to eat or cook something from a country that was playing on any given day. It was challenging but fulfilling. I had a lot of failures and some successes and all in all I left the challenge with a few things: a bigger knowledge of global cuisine, a better idea of what works and doesn't in the kitchen, and a whole lot of content for my blog.
But Nikki the World Cup has already started and I've seen nothing from you! What's going on?
I know, I'm totally failing this year.
I went into this year with the most ambitious plans. I created a crazy spreadsheet over a month ago and mapped out where I was going to focus on the countries that I was least familiar with or totally failed at last time around. I had a great plan... and then it all fell apart for a few reasons.
Life!
Just after I got this plan all put together, I got a great surprise. I got a promotion at work! It was definitely some good news but with it, came more work. I got sidetracked by my new responsibilities and kept figuring that I still had a lot of time until the World Cup to organize my project.
Dan and I also went on an amazing vacation! I have no complaints there but we all know how vacations go - in addition to the time you're away, you're also getting work ready for your leave and then when you get back you have a lot to do to catch up. Throw in things like laundry and packing/unpacking and there's definitely extra to do. Once I was all settled in from this, I realized the games were starting the next day. That's definitely not enough time to plan out the variety of meals I wanted to do.
On top of all that, I was turning right around to head out for a family/work combo trip that would keep me out of my kitchen for several days. There would be options to eat out of course but I really had wanted to cook the meals and going out of my way to find places that worked, didn't seem ideal.
You'd think that with all the countries in the World Cup, diversity would be a non-issue. However, my plan to start with the countries I was least familiar with, led to a list of African and Eastern European countries. In my initial searches for dishes, I started to notice a pattern. Many of the countries signature dishes were very similar to each other. While I'm sure there are noticeable differences in the seasonings and ingredients when you compare them all side by side, it would still have been a lot of stews, fried pastries, and rice dishes in a short amount of time.
I really wanted to focus on the really key dishes instead of picking something smaller just to change it up. I was trying to map out ways to change up the order I did the countries to space it out, but to keep with trying to eat the dishes on the day they played, it was hard to make it work.
The last issue was just out of practicality. As much as I loved this project - I kept running into an issue in the past. If I'm cooking a different dish every day for 3 weeks, I'm going to be making more food than Dan and I can possibly eat.
I've dealt with this before by inviting people over for dinner but the reality is that I still end up with too much food. Add this in with the fact that some of these dishes are time intensive, and it all becomes really impractical.
While, in general, I have more time and money than I did four years ago - I still have the overall goal of wasting less, and I like to use my free time for other hobbies, particularly my fitness.
After thinking about how to deal with these obstacles without just trashing the whole project, I came up with a good solution:
Cook a dish from each country, but remove the constraint of cooking it on the day they play.
Obviously, if I can plan it that way, it would be more fun to eat a dish while watching a game and I want to try for that as much as possible. However, I have no intention of cooking these dishes every day in a row. My new plan is to give myself the whole summer to try something from the 32 countries. That gives me 2-3 days in between each to each leftovers, buy groceries, and just spread out the project.
Making this change has given me new excitement for this challenge and I'm excited to get to it!
In the meantime, here are some of my favorite posts from past challenges:
http://nikkilinc.blogspot.com/2014/06/world-cup-eating-challenge-day-4.html
http://nikkilinc.blogspot.com/2014/06/day-12-spain-world-cup-eating-challenge.html
http://nikkilinc.blogspot.com/2014/07/semifinals-day-1-brazilian-feijoada-and.html
http://nikkilinc.blogspot.com/2015/06/day-9-australia-world-cup-eating.html
Diversity
You'd think that with all the countries in the World Cup, diversity would be a non-issue. However, my plan to start with the countries I was least familiar with, led to a list of African and Eastern European countries. In my initial searches for dishes, I started to notice a pattern. Many of the countries signature dishes were very similar to each other. While I'm sure there are noticeable differences in the seasonings and ingredients when you compare them all side by side, it would still have been a lot of stews, fried pastries, and rice dishes in a short amount of time.
I really wanted to focus on the really key dishes instead of picking something smaller just to change it up. I was trying to map out ways to change up the order I did the countries to space it out, but to keep with trying to eat the dishes on the day they played, it was hard to make it work.
Time, Money, and Waste
The last issue was just out of practicality. As much as I loved this project - I kept running into an issue in the past. If I'm cooking a different dish every day for 3 weeks, I'm going to be making more food than Dan and I can possibly eat.
I've dealt with this before by inviting people over for dinner but the reality is that I still end up with too much food. Add this in with the fact that some of these dishes are time intensive, and it all becomes really impractical.
While, in general, I have more time and money than I did four years ago - I still have the overall goal of wasting less, and I like to use my free time for other hobbies, particularly my fitness.
So... What Does This Mean for the Challenge?
After thinking about how to deal with these obstacles without just trashing the whole project, I came up with a good solution:
Cook a dish from each country, but remove the constraint of cooking it on the day they play.
Obviously, if I can plan it that way, it would be more fun to eat a dish while watching a game and I want to try for that as much as possible. However, I have no intention of cooking these dishes every day in a row. My new plan is to give myself the whole summer to try something from the 32 countries. That gives me 2-3 days in between each to each leftovers, buy groceries, and just spread out the project.
Making this change has given me new excitement for this challenge and I'm excited to get to it!
In the meantime, here are some of my favorite posts from past challenges:
http://nikkilinc.blogspot.com/2014/06/world-cup-eating-challenge-day-4.html
http://nikkilinc.blogspot.com/2014/06/day-12-spain-world-cup-eating-challenge.html
http://nikkilinc.blogspot.com/2014/07/semifinals-day-1-brazilian-feijoada-and.html
http://nikkilinc.blogspot.com/2015/06/day-9-australia-world-cup-eating.html
No comments:
Post a Comment