2/6/11 - Eat Something That I've Never Had Before

A little background. I was on my second day of this month of trying new things, and I had no idea what I was going to do. Maybe I should have planned this month out a little better...

It was Super Bowl Sunday, and I knew I had to be creative. I couldn't take a whole day and figure something out, there was football to watch!

I was in Trader Joe's, trying to think of something I could eat that I've never tried before. The vegetables looked pretty tame. Maybe a spicy pepper would do. Although, in High School, I shoved a jalapeno pepper down my gullet and almost passed out... So I couldn't even fall back on this familiar and hated rival.

Walking through the store, I couldn't find anything that really stood out. This was, Trader Joe's after all. Not an inconspicuous bodega in Chinatown.

But then, in the cheese area, I saw a little plastic container. In it, was a little white glob submerged in an opaque milky liquid. It reminded me of the biological specimens that we used to dissect in biology class. I gagged just thinking about the consistency and I knew that this would do for my project.

The packaging was in Italian, but it said it was Buffalo Mozzarella.



Though I've eaten mozzarella plenty of times, and I'm sure this is exactly how conventional mozzarella is packaged, seeing it this way made me disgusted. This challenge was going to became more about overcoming a fear than anything else. So I bought it the thing.

And as if it knew what I thought about it, the mozzarella spit some of its liquid out at me when I broke the crease of the lid.

Oh, is this how it's going to be. You're not going to go down without a fight, are you?

I poured out some of the cheese's watery bath so that I could more easily get to the heart of things. When I cut into the cheese with a dull knife, the rubbery rind broke after some resistance and exposed the soft inside. With the liquid, the rubbery rind, and the inside that resembled cottage cheese, I thought that if anything this cheese was in need of a product redesign. Stat.



But, after all that, when I ate it, the cheese tasted pretty good.

Like I said before, this challenge became less about what I was eating and more about eating something that, quite frankly, scared me.