{"id":3109,"date":"2010-09-08T23:48:29","date_gmt":"2010-09-09T06:48:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/of.jennism.com\/?p=3109"},"modified":"2010-10-12T23:33:46","modified_gmt":"2010-10-13T06:33:46","slug":"mission-4-dinner-party-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/?p=3109","title":{"rendered":"Mission #4: Dinner Party &#8211; Part I"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Note: The 2010 scavenger hunt is over (a concluding post will come soon) and we got first place out of 121 teams!  This is a series explaining the background and thinking of our missions of the <a href=\"http:\/\/bit.ly\/deepfriedtwinkies\">SF Street Food Scavenger Hunt 2010<\/a>!<\/p>\n<p><b>Mission: It&#8217;s time to host a dinner party, but not just with YOUR friends, but with another team playing the game. You will have to hunt down a secret ingredient and make a dish with it to be shared with the other team at a dinner party in a location of your choice. <\/b><\/p>\n<p>Ok first.  What team?<\/p>\n<p>Another team playing the game?  I scanned the list of the teams that were playing the game.  Ok, what now?  Do I try to play with the team that was at the top?  Strategy.  Strategy.  Last year, I was able to find contact information for the teams since the photos were linked to personal sites.  This year, it was all hosted on thegogame website.  I decided to go for the most obvious one\u00e2\u20ac\u201dLick My Spoon.  I knew that they made a writeup last year about the game&#8230;and I immediately sent off an email to Stephanie, the primary author of LMS.<\/p>\n<p>Then I found Michael M whose team was Michael Eats SF.  He was the first place winner of the 7&#215;7 100 Big Eat SF Foodspotting Scavenger Hunt in February.  I had been dying to ask him about his strategy of eating at 100 places in less than 2 weeks.  Fortunately, I remembered his twitter name since it was all over foodspotting.  Plus he used his full name as part of the twitter account.  I looked at his website and confirmed that it was him&#8230;since his Japanese wife&#8217;s unique name was both present at the Go Game site and his personal site.  Email sent.<\/p>\n<p>Granted at this point, I had not even asked my team.  I had low expectations, not certain whether anybody in the team had the desire to host the dinner party or know who to ask.<\/p>\n<p>And most importantly, I hosted dinner parties in the past.  I always thoroughly enjoyed cooking, serving and hosting people.  And certainly didn&#8217;t think anybody else on my team would have that much energy.<\/p>\n<p>A day later, I got a response from Stephanie and she CC&#8217;ed the rest of the LMS team.  I was nearly jumping for joy at my desk at work.  Secured!  People!  Guests!<\/p>\n<p>In between client work, I quickly listed out several dishes that I had successfully made in the past, intended it to tempt the palate and to encourage attendance to dinner with strangers:<br \/>\nCorn casserole<br \/>\n&#8220;Boiled&#8221; water<br \/>\nBraised beef<br \/>\nAvocado tomato salad OR tomato peach salad with red onions<br \/>\nGazpacho<br \/>\nroasted grapes and meatballs<br \/>\nVermicelli with grilled chicken, cilantro, and kimchi?<br \/>\nGoat cheese with lemon juice, pepper, rosemary<br \/>\nfreshly made soda water!<\/p>\n<p>I quickly dashed out the email to the Lick My Spoon team and cc&#8217;ed my team.  To my horror, someone replied who they loved the menu.  Then another praised my incredible menu.<\/p>\n<p>Then I paused&#8230;if everyone showed up from LMS and my team, there would be over 11 people.  The biggest dinner party that I had served was only 4 people including myself. And it was because I had tons of leftover ingredients from a weekend party.<\/p>\n<p>Would I have enough food?  Better yet, did I have that much room in my apartment?  I decided that Chris and I could sit out if worse came to worse.<\/p>\n<p>I wondered if I was getting ahead of myself by hosting a dinner party on a short notice.  I had less than 48 hours to get something ready.  And there would be no way that I would stoop to store-prepared food\u00e2\u20ac\u201deverything <i>had<\/i> to be made from scratch.  At least most things.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Note: The 2010 scavenger hunt is over (a concluding post will come soon) and we got first place out of 121 teams! This is a series explaining the background and thinking of our missions of the SF Street Food Scavenger &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/?p=3109\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[35,36],"class_list":["post-3109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-gogame","tag-street-food"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3109"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3170,"href":"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3109\/revisions\/3170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}