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Win two tix to July 9 Hendrick's tea with The Adventurists
"A force for global mischief and global good," the UK-based Adventurists strive to make the world a little less boring by hunting down thrills in extreme locales, all while raising money for charity.
Win two tix to July 9 Hendrick's tea with The Adventurists
"A force for global mischief and global good," the UK-based Adventurists strive to make the world a little less boring by hunting down thrills in extreme locales, all while raising money for charity. While it's their job to test out adventures (rickshaw runs through the Rajasthan Desert? Mongolian horse derbies?), it's your job to sign up for the vetted wildness and earn cash for organizations of both the Adventurists' and your own choosing. So far, they have seven international challenges to choose from, and team members are selected at random, meaning you could very well end up trekking through miles of jungle in Southeast Asia with complete strangers.
This Saturday, July 9, the Adventurists will gather in Philly at The Union League (140 S. Broad St.), along with Hendrick's, to host a gin-infused tea party from 4 to 9 p.m., with speaker Charles Brewer-Carias (pictured) taking the podium around 5. The grandson of an British diplomat who calls Venezuela home, Brewer-Carias is quite possibly the model for The Most Interesting Man in the World — he's an accomplished author, discovered the world's largest quartzite cave and has dozens of species of plants and animals named after him. Throughout the event, they'll be serving high-end teas (Earl Grey, Lapsang Souchong, Darjeeling) and a selection of Hendrick's cocktails. Bring your best etiquette; appropriate tea attire is required.
Tickets to the event can be purchased here, but Meal Ticket has a pair to give away. Entering is easy: Before tomorrow evening at 5 p.m., simply detail your most impressive food adventure in the comments. (If you're not yet registered to comment, please do so with an email address you check regularly — that's how we'll alert the winner.) Happy adventuring!
UPDATE [08jul11]: Cheers to Meal Ticket commenter Sarah Aileen, who wins two tix to tomorrow's event for her anecdote, which you can read after the jump.
A few years back I ventured to the Basque region of Spain, with the sole intent of eating as much pork and seafood, and drinking as much cider, as possible. Once there, we took a bus to a small town called Lekeitio, a daunting, if not lovely, coastal town. We tumbled into the nearest cafe for some much needed sustenance. "Octopus! Great! Beautiful! We'll have a large", except my Spanish (Euskadi?) not being up to par, it was more like lots of pointing and hand motions. "And cider! Cidre?? YES!" The octopus arrived, skin and tentacles still attached, and very much still living, topped with what can only be called a GENEROUS portion of sweet smoked paprika. We spent the next several hours getting, uh, well wasted, on Basque cider while peeling prying fighting newly caught octopus off wooden plates. Beautiful.
Photo: Rory Carroll, guardian.co.uk
A few years back I ventured to the Basque region of Spain, with the sole intent of eating as much pork and seafood, and drinking as much cider, as possible. Once there, we took a bus to a small town called Lekeitio, a daunting, if not lovely, coastal town. We tumbled into the nearest cafe for some much needed sustenance. "Octopus! Great! Beautiful! We'll have a large", except my Spanish (Euskadi?) not being up to par, it was more like lots of pointing and hand motions. "And cider! Cidre?? YES!" The octopus arrived, skin and tentacles still attached, and very much still living, topped with what can only be called a GENEROUS portion of sweet smoked paprika. We spent the next several hours getting, uh, well wasted, on Basque cider while peeling prying fighting newly caught octopus off wooden plates. Beautiful.— Sarah Aileen- I'm typically a pretty adventurous eater. Crispy lamb's tongue? Delicious. Bollocks sautéed up fresh from the cow? Bring it on, whether it’s the finest restaurant in town or a food stand halfway around the world.
But last year, I went to Haiti to do volunteer work. Each day, I’d be out around tent cities watching food being cooked in places that looked like the earthquake had happened days ago instead of months ago. Now most of my visit, I got food at the place I stayed which was not damaged in the quake. But one day, my driver decided to buy me lunch. I cringed a bit as a heaping mound of unidentifiable meat and sauce was heaped on my plate, along with the ubiquitous pik-leez. Definitely a “What Would Bourdain Do” moment! I went with politeness, and I’m glad I did. It was the best tasting, most authentic meal of my trip. As you often find when travelling, they gave their best to the guest along with a cold bottle of Prestige beer. A truly memorable meal.
— emmkay - I've tasted a good number of exotic flavors: snails and alligator, quail and pheasant, rabbit and goat, haggis and marrow. But I will never, ever forget that one fateful middle school day someone brought chocolate chip chirpies in as their original project. Let's be clear here: "chripies" = crickets. And as everyone bit into the cookies, a loud crunch rang through the classroom. Only then was it revealed that there were critters in our cookies. For my friend John who turned green and immediately spit his out, it was a cruel joke. For the the rest of us, it was a Double Dare physical challenge. Turns out, crickets aren't that bad. Not much flavor, but tremendously crispy. The haggis was certainly worse.— AllisonK
- Sitting on a rocky beach on an island off the coast of Southeast Alaska, I was waiting for my final tour group of the day to arrive. I had an hour in between the tours and it was low tide. The tidal shifts in Alaska are pretty significant with variations of up to 30ft. During this low tide, a good portion of the tidal zone was exposed and you could find starfish, sea urchins, sea cucumbers and sponges and a variety of other invertabrates. I had read that you can cut down the middle of a sea cucumber and a there are 5 pieces of meat that they use for sushi. So I took my leatherman, cut open the sea cucumber and found 5 little pieces of meat. Removing those with my knife, I washed them off with my water bottle and enjoyed fresh sushi on a beach.— Sexyredkid
- Great comments so far guys, keep 'em coming!— Drew Lazor
- Gator on a stick. Alligator insides on a brown lollipop stick, cloaked in sweet fried splendor. Never tried it. Anna tried it though. In fact, Anna loved it! Anna is my younger sister. She is 21. She's beautiful. Beautiful! Yellow goddess hair and strong walnut-sized eyes. She is five feet, two inches. She loves Elvis. And she is a young woman living with Down Syndrome. She is limited from traveling, relying on our parents or a cheese bus that picks her up from school and takes her home. So, when she was awarded a trip to the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia, via train, for winning Best Chef at school, it was euphoria. Three other students, plus her teacher Mr. Garcia and speech therapist Ms. Rathgeb, journeyed with her and they stopped at Beck's Cajun Cafe inside the market for gator. This was Anna's first time at the market, first time on a train, and certainly first time chewing alligator meat. When Anna told me about her experience, my mother prompting her with, “tell your sister what you ate,” her feverish eyes grew big like plums and I quieted to listen, knowing I'd always remember her answer as she looked in my direction with a smile full of treasure: “Gator,” said said and then paused, “on stick!”— elizatron
- This particular food adventure may not be impressive as much us downright weird, and more so because of the experience than the food. It was in Paris, somewhere near Sacre Coeur. I know I’m not the only person to have mistakenly ventured into this joint, because somehow us tourists can not seem to resist the hairless, spandex-clad wonder lifting cheese dumbbells that is painted on the outside of the “restaurant.” So despite the blaring indication of the sort of stuff that waits beyond the door, we enter anyway. Ensues the craziness. First, we are shown to our seats. Or rather, two of us are forced to crawl over the tabletops to get to the seats against the wall, and once seated, the tables are pushed snugly against us by the server-owner-chef-extraordinaire. The other two get to sit comfortably in chairs. We shortly discover that there is only one thing on the menu –very stinky cheese fondue with a lovely assortment of stale crackers and bread for dipping. So while we wait for that magic to arrive, we figure why not order a little wine, maybe we’ll warm to this whole experience. Oh wait, the wine is served in baby bottles with the tops of the nipple snipped off so you get the most out of every sip! Time to get blitzed. We attempt to eat some of the fondue in between as many giant swigs of red wine as we can muster out of those absurd bottles, but alas, we can’t get the stuff down. Not to worry. The SCOE I mentioned earlier is there to frighten you into finishing the food. That’s right, you don’t get to leave till you’re done! Luckily, the rest is a little hazy…we really went to town with the wine. The only other thing I can recall is that the toilet seat was a giant wedge of cheese… Isn’t this is the side of Paris you wish you discovered?— toughsuger
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