Food Challenge

The past couple days, I’ve enjoyed two wonderfully relaxing days off, but before I recount the adventures, allow me first to touch on my days on the glacier. Recently, we’ve had enough slow days and weather days to make even a couch potato crave activity. Between the empty port in Juneau and the engulfing waves of fog on the Herbert glacier, we’ve had few tourists and lots of time on our hands. In a world of cell phones, television, and Internet, most people would find our remote glacial camp miserably boring. We have no reception, no computers, nor movies. Other than the little generator, we don’t even have electricity. But don’t worry; we’ve managed to find ways to entertain ourselves.
Other than my marathon reading sessions, I’ve been playing a lot of cards. Gin Rummy, Up and Down the River, and Cribbage are the favorites at dog camp, but recently, bragging rights are no longer enough. To make the games more interesting, we’ve raised the stakes by incorporating dish duty, water binges, and food challenges. Jake and I are the only ones dumb enough to play the food challenges, or rather, I’m the only one. For some unknown reason, I’ve been unable to win a single food challenge and have paid for it dearly by eating all sorts of barely edible concoctions. The first creation I was forced to eat was a pancake made of Skittles, teriyaki sauce, ranch, peanut M&Ms, peanut butter, canola oil, hot sauce, honey smoked ham, and burnt pancake batter. I have to admit, after two bites I called a cop-out. For the next food challenge, I decided to regulate the ingredients and ruled that the finished product had to be bearable. Of course, I lost the next food challenge card game and had to eat four deviled eggs meticulously made by Chef Jake. The first was a regular deviled egg. The second was filled with melted M&Ms, peanut butter, and chocolate. The third was a mixture of hot sauces and egg yolk. And the final deviled egg was filled with ranch and tang powder. As delectable as those may sound, it took awhile for my stomach to digest dinner. The next day brought a new food challenge, and I was determined not to lose. For this game, the winner (Jake) had to make a delicious dessert for the loser (me). Kudos to Jake, the dessert was delicious…and unique. He deep-fried a Snickers bar in pancake batter, placed it in a cored green apple, then drizzled chocolate peanut butter sauce over the top. Luckily, Seth was willing to help out and be the garbage disposal for all my leftovers. After this food challenge, I finally realized that I was mentally horrible at the food challenge card games. The following games resulted in regular, tasty dinners of Mexican pie and pizzas rather than unique concoctions that make your stomach turn. Because I am quite competitive, I like to think that the reason I’d play so poorly is that subconsciously I wanted to see what Chef Jake could cook up.
The past two days, I’ve been back in Juneau and enjoying my free time. Yesterday, I woke up late and spent more time than I feel comfortable admitting sitting in a café and watching soccer reruns. Today, Chrissy, her dogs (Bo and Lucy), and I ventured up Lemon Creek towards the Ptarmigan Glacier. Since the day was so beautiful, we were planning on a nice long hike. Unfortunately, Bo and Lucy happened upon the trail of a porcupine and cut our hike short. We pulled out as many of the quills on the trail as we could but had to return to the apartment for heavy-duty tweezers in order to remove the quills from the inside of their mouths and gums. We finished off the afternoon by enjoying a relaxing walk along the beach, porcupine free.