Day 19: My Introduction to Soy Chicken (and other short stories)

Today I met up with my fellow dinos: P, J, D, and G. All participants (runners + driver) in the Ragnar Relay, we met to strategize and obviously eat.. as these are quite frankly, our favorite activities.

First, I'm proud to say, P and I did a short run through West LA to get our hearts pumping (steep hills up make for scary flrunning down. Flrunning, for your information, means that you're running so fast you literally have to flap your arms a little bit to keep yourself from tumbling). Then it was onto dinner. Except.. all the dinos in my group LOVE meat. Imagine to our horror when we tried to find a place that everyone wanted to eat! Trust me.. this isn't as easy as it might seem. Each person has had lunch already at a certain genre that they don't want to re-eat, each person has had dinner the night before at a certain genre that they don't want to re-eat, and Thursday nights have still quite the long line and wait (and at 8 pm, this was not an option to 2 very hungry runners subsisting off of one orange and a coke zero).

So as we were driving around, we came upon this cute little Indian Restaurant. Upon closer inspection, it turned out that this hotspot was actually a full vegetarian joint.

In essence, what you do is choose from a variety of different dishes. You pick 3, and a choice of bread (naan, garlic naan, or roti) and get yogurt, salad, and voila! A fantastic dinner. Among the choices were jackfruit (something that was new to me), Spicy Chickpeas, and lo and behold.. Soy Chicken Tikka Masala. I couldn't believe when I saw this. I know that Morningstar has produced plenty of meat-less options, but to have it transformed into a age-old meal! If only they had soy chicken tikka masala kati rolls...drool.



Piling up on our mini dishes, we came away with our food, which turned out into a mini-feast: This is before the garlic naan and the mango juice. Really quite delicious! I will say this though.. after 19 days of the "land-meat-free" diet, this came as a great find for Stego & myself.. while to my other dino friends, it was a pretty big shock without any type of meat available. It really brought to my mind the changes that have quietly occurred behind the scenes during my fast thus far.

To be discussed in the next post. but first, a little blast to the past for you all (credit to P for this one).. who remembers the sham-WOW?