Bokampers Beast Burger Challenge 6-22-16
Taming the Beast once again!
My last post was all the way back in May and here we are, at the beginning of July before I got around to making another post. Consistency in post creation time is definitely not one of my strong points (as we have seen since the Olive Garden days), but better late than never. I had so many fun things to write about and I wanted to get in a blog post prior to my trip to Bimini since I knew that would be a lot of content, but it will all work out, especially with the impromptu challenge I ended up doing.
This essentially started out just like any other work week, heading into the office bright and early on Monday morning. The difference this time around, I knew there were going to be representatives from the company i work for coming to visit and we were headed to Bokampers on Wednesday for dinner. Honestly, the thought DID cross my mind to actually go and do the challenge, but given the circumstances, I thought it might be best not to. As you can see, that is not at all how it went down, so let’s talk about how it came about.
In the days prior, I would normally change up my diet and eating habits to get ready for the massive amount of food, but this time around, I just kinda went with the flow. On Wednesday morning, I meet Matt and Vinod and we went about our normal work day. I did however work through my lunch break, which helped keep my belly empty for the challenge. After work, it was off to Bokampers I went, where I met up with everyone else.
When I arrived, the first thing I did was look for my picture and name, neither of which were on the wall of fame. It’s quite disappointing that after almost two years, two managers, and multiple emails, they still have not gotten my picture on the wall. I sat back down at the table and began to talk with everyone and Matt was asking what items on the menu were good and I replied “I have no idea, every time I have gone here, I have done the burger challenge.” We laughed and proceeded to order a bunch of appetizers for the table. While waiting for the apps to arrive, I showed everyone some pictures of the challenge and spoke about it and that my picture was never put on the wall. At this time, Matt looked over at me and said “hey, no pressure or anything, but if you want to go ahead and try the burger challenge, you’re welcome to do so.” I laughed and said “so, you’re giving me the green light then?” and he said “yep, I’m giving you the green light. You have nothing to lose.” I laughed again and said “screw it, you guys want to see this? Let’s do it then, order that burger up!”
As we waited for the burger to come out, all of the appetizers arrived. I wanted to try all of the different items we ordered, but I had a much more important goal in mind. As the Rocky theme song came on and people started to cheer, I knew it was go time. As the burger was placed down in front of me, everyone took pictures and got really excited; I couldn’t help but smile and pose for pictures. While waiting for the burger, I drafted up a different game plan for tackling the massive burger. Normally, I would just chop it up into smaller, more manageable pieces and eat it like an actual burger, but I decided to eat the meat and greasy items first and work my way from there. I usually start to feel a little bit sick when I am full and trying to eat greasy food, so I was hoping this would help alleviate that issue.
I quickly ate down the 4 lb burger patty, the 4 eggs, 4 slices of cheese, and 8 strips of bacon. All of it went down easy enough with a few sips of tea here and there, then I moved onto the bottom bun, which was soaked in grease from the burger. I pressed out a lot of grease onto napkins and ate down the bread piece by piece. That bun was so greasy that I could have squeezed it all out and make a nice glass of meat juice. That bottom bun was definitely a killer and I had to take it a little slower at times when the grease started to get to me. Through out the duration of the challenge, a group of 3 or 4 kids kept coming by to check on me and see how I was doing. Most of them though I had no chance at finishing, but there was at least one person on my side the entire time. After eating down the bottom bun, I was probably nearing the halfway point for my time.
All that was left was this massive umbrella-shaped piece of bread, which has given me problems in the past while trying to chew through the tough outer layer. I didn’t try to force it down quickly, I had plenty of time so I just cruised through and ate it bite after bite. The kids continued to come by and more of them started to believe that I might actually finish the burger. I ate down almost all of the bread and squished up the last bit into what resembled a bread stick and ate it bite by bite, until I was finally finished. Surprisingly, it went down easier than the last time I completed it; I never struggled at any point during the challenge. Everyone cheered and took lots of pictures and once again, I couldn’t help but smile. I was actually very proud of myself for completing the challenge in a completely impromptu manner and without any major struggling. After finishing, the manager came over and took my picture, wrote down a quote for my plaque, and said that in 2-3 weeks my picture and plaque will be on the wall. Hopefully this time around it actually gets posted - I will just need to go by and check on it at some point.
After playing paintball and going completely wild with that last weekend, this weekend was a lot more relaxed. To start off, a huge congratulations to my friend Michael and his new wife Efrat. I was very happy for the both of them and I was glad that I could be there to share the experience.
The two of them are as happy as can be and I am sure they will be for many more years to come.
Here I am in this picture just completely in my own picture not posing for the camera like everyone else. The other great part about the wedding was that I got to see a lot of my friends, some of which I have known since elementary school. It has been so many years since I have seen a lot of these guys and it was awesome to see all of them.
I really should have taken more pictures of the food, but this will just have to work. Michael’s family has a catering company,Tastebuds, which definitely meant that the food was fabulous. We started off with various appetizers of breads, hummus, and various cold salads, such as a beet salad, which were all tasty. For dinner, we had prime rib, salmon, Brussels sprouts, grilled zucchini, mashed potatoes, rice, mushrooms, and chicken.
Happy Memorial Day! I was really glad to be out of work today and it was also right around my grandma’s birthday, so we made dinner plans at Benihana.
My sister and I are always being silly and having fun. For anyone that might not know, Benihana is a Japanese Hibachi restaurant and it is always a lot of fun going there and enjoying the show. I had so much seafood, rice, and veggies and ate like a king.
I didn’t take pictures from some of the other days following this, but for whatever reason, I started to buy massive amounts of meat for lunch. The goal each day was to get at least 2 lbs of meat, which ends up costing me around 13-15$. I did this with salmon, chicken, beef, pork and whatever else I came across. Meals like this usually meant no dinner (or a light one) and lots of water. If you’re going to eat crazy, do it responsibly!
Here we are, back at sweet tomatoes! I guess it’s good that I had lots of vegetables for once, especially considering how my diet has been this past week. I always get a lot of looks, especially from the younger kids that pass by as they wonder why I am filling my table up with food.
Now this was an absolutely fantastic day. On Thursday, I was looking at the meetup calendar and saw this event for Slide the City. At first I wasn’t sure if I even wanted to go, but upon realizing that I probably wouldn’t get another chance to go for a year, I decided it was something I should probably go and do. I looked up a bunch of Youtube videos to see what it was all about and I said - “yep, I am definitely going to go to this!” I bought my ticket for unlimited slides and I was just hoping my Go Pro would come in time for it, which it did on Friday. I did not have any accessories yet, so I ended up making a selfie stick mount Friday night, which worked REALLY well.
As I arrived at the park, I took a look around and there were food trucks and people all over the place. I got in line to get my wrist band, float, and bag and just started observing everything going on. Normally, the event is suppose to be a 1000 foot water slide (the biggest slip and slide ever!) but for some reason this one was closer to 100. When I looked at it, I actually felt like it wasn’t going to be all that great. The slide was really short and just kinda felt like you were going down a small hill. Either way, I was going to make the best out of it.
Jessica was the first one to arrive and once I met up with her, the others started to trickle in. Once everyone got their floats sorted out, we headed to the top of the hill. Here is one of the group shots for the first set of us that arrived. We started off slow, just setting the float on the floor and scooting forward slowly until we went sliding down the hill. After our first decent, I drastically changed my tune about the whole thing, because it was SO MUCH MORE fun than I ever thought. As soon as you get moving, you pickup a lot of speed and you just go flying down the hill.
After a few rides down, we got the hang of things and started to really get moving. Here we are, running and jumping down the slide, which was by far the best way to go down. Below is a link to some of the videos I took with my Go Pro - I will edit and post the rest at some point if I haven’t already. Originally I figured I would only stay for a few hours then most likely go play paintball, but I was having so much fun that I stayed all day with Jessica and Ray until the park closed.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7JzkOKqZJs2ufBxBUMM_G1VjXGeAlNnI
It is always great to get out there and do things, because you never know how much fun you might have.
6-5-16 Brunch at the Isles Casino
After going to Slide the City and having so much fun, I saw a post for this brunch event and said “sure, WHY NOT? Let’s go pig out hehe” and sure enough, that is exactly what I did. I have been to this buffet a few times long ago, but never for the brunch menu. I met Angela right outside of the buffet and we were just chatting as we waited for the others to arrive. Once the majority of the group showed up, we sat down and got ready to eat.
I was actually surprised at how many options they had to eat. There were various stations themed around certain cuisines. To start off, you had the regular breakfast section, which had eggs benedict, bacon, sausage, parfaits, and other classic breakfast items. Next to this was the omelet station, where you could customize and get a freshly made omelet. At the end of this section was a section for cold items like Peruvian ceviche, squid salad, and a few other things, but to be honest, I did not particularly like too many of them (top right of the photo below this)
The next area was for Italian food, which had a large variety of salad items as well as antipasto types of items. They also had pizza, stuffed shells, calamari (I ate tons of this lol) grill/coal fired chicken wings and a few other items. Adjacent to this was the Asian cuisine, which had various stir fry, rice, noodle, fried chicken wings, and plenty of veggies. After that came the grill, which had steaks, salmon, and corn. After that was a table which had everything you needed for fried chicken and biscuits. I should have at least tried the chicken and gravy, but I was too busy eyeballing the next area.
Next we had the carving station, which was great. They had prime rib (which was cooked beautifully,) turkey, and ham. At the end of this area was the soups and breads. Unfortunately, I didn’t really feel for any of the soups or breads, so I skipped this area.
In the very middle area we had a big mix of items. First, there was sushi, which was a small assortment, but I tried a few pieces as well as some seafood salad. Going clockwise, they had pre-made salads, which consisted of an arugula, strawberry, and goat cheese with some kind of vinaigrette and your classic Caesar Salad. If my memory serves me correctly (this was over a month ago!) then there were made to order crepes. I know that I have seen the crepe station here once before, but I just can’t remember if I saw it this day or not. After that came a huge assortment of salad items which was next to various bagels and pastries, with a toaster type of machine that you drop your bread into. It was actually pretty cool, because you drop your item in at the top and it falls down onto a little conveyor belt and it toasts it up and drops back out of the bottom.
Now, this is where the dessert starts! They had vanilla and chocolate soft serve that you could get, as well as a million cakes and pastries all over the place. If you look back at the top photo, you can see the huge line of pre-sliced cakes just waiting to be taken to freedom by someone like myself. They had red velvet, vanilla, chocolate, and mixtures of everything with various toppings. There were also mini pies and cheesecakes in various flavors, bread pudding, banana pudding, and more items all over the place.
Group photo, SMILE! We all had a good time eating and chatting and everyone except Monica and Angela left after brunch. We went back inside the casino and played a few slots before it became just me. I haven’t been to the casino in quite a while, so I stayed for a few hours and even though there were plenty of “I should have went home” moments, but I was there to just have fun and I certainly did.
Has it really been a whole week? Man, time just flies sometimes, but as usual, I made the best out of the weekend. We got a lot of rain today, but we still played a few games. It took Kevin, James, and Stan FOREVER (the usual for them) to get to the field, but oh well. The highlight of today was by far the 2v3 that we had. It was James and Stan against myself and two others; I have some Go Pro footage, but being cloudy and how far away I was shooting from, it really made no sense to post it. Anyway, the significance of this game is that I walked all the way up the right side of the field, which was way open. Along the way I saw Stan moving up the field and I shot at him a few times, but I didn’t have a good angle. I continued to move up fully uncontested and once I reached a little past the half way mark, James shot a few shots toward me from spawn, but I Just positioned accordingly and saw poor Stan wide open with his back/side to me and I just laid him out with paint. I hit him a good 3 or 4 times on his side and then proceeded to look for James. Unfortunately for me, as I was approaching, James made a complete retreat and left Stan to die and once I went looking for James, he was all the way in the back corner opposite to me, so when I walked up to the spawn, I was wide open and got shot by him. In the weeks to come, it’s been nothing but smack talk regarding this moment, but we had some fun.
After running around, we went to the one and only.... yes, you know what I’m talking about, CHOW TIME! I am a loyal and returning customer and they must love me here by now. James, Rena, and Kevin came as well and we ate to our heart’s content. Any day at Chow Time is a good day.
I went ahead and took another visit to Sweet Tomatoes this week prior to my trip. They had a few new items, which I really enjoyed this time around. There was a cheese tortalini soup and another vegetable soup, both of which were very good, and I ate a whole lot of it.
6-15-16 BIMINI HERE WE GO!
I have been so excited and waiting for this day to arrive, and here it is!
Here is a link to the videos I took:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7JzkOKqZJs1NMRVKOa3fTlaK0yUI6x1m
And while available, here is a link for the pictures:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0ByNAkKmmnPWCTmtFWnpuTTVZVFE
All packed, the boat is in the water, and we are ready to roll!
It looks like everyone else is just as excited as I am.
Good old stiltsville, I had to take a few pictures.
We stayed at Bimini Sands in a 3 story town house with 2 bedrooms, a full kitchen, a living room, and a loft area, which also included a place to park the boat out front. I should have taken a few more pictures of where we stayed, but here’s all I have.
A quick selfie from our balcony.
Here we go, fishing time! I am all suited up and ready to go (yep, the go pro is ready too.)
In a few short hours, we caught a good amount of fish and I also caught a few sharks. It’s crazy to see how big some of the fish are here compared to back home. Normally you only see maybe 10 inch strawberry groupers, but out here we saw them upwards of 20 inches. Even the yellowtail were huge, averaging around 15 inches and getting up to 19 or so.
Tonight’s dinner! From boat to table, it just doesn’t get any fresher than this! We had steamed fish with soy sauce, ginger, and scallion as well as baked fish with thyme, garlic, butter, and other spices. We made so much fish and everything was very delicious. Most people don’t always believe me and my appetite, but tonight a few more people soon became aware that I wasn’t messing around. Once everyone was done eating, I went ahead and took care of the leftover. I gathered up all of the fish that wasn’t eaten and put it all into the container we cooked in and feasted on all of it. Yea, I was having a great time for sure.
The sunset (or at least what I can see of it) from our balcony.
We went out again for some late night fishing, but the seas ended up being 4-5 foot and after an hour or so we called it quits. We did however land this big jack and a few other fish during this time, so it wasn’t a complete waste.
The next day was really rough out at the ocean and it was also a little bit of relax time. We got suited up and ready to swim and take a trip across to the other island and see what else Bimini had to offer.
We took the water taxi across to the next island and rented a big golf cart to cruise around on the island.
We stopped at a small shopping area, which sold various souvenirs, but mostly clothing. With my vast collection of shirts from traveling, I really should have picked one up. Next time I will definitely have to pick one up and add it to my stock pile.
One of our first stops was to get some conch ceviche, which was made to order and absolutely delicious.
After that we went cruising around and found a private beach area. We went for a swim in the crystal clear water with its smooth sand.
For the sake of the length and size of this post, I skipped out on putting too many pictures, but after our swim, we went looking for the rest of our group. All we knew was that they were somewhere by the Hilton, so off we went. We stopped at the casino and took a walk around, and like a hawk, Wayne IMMEDIATELY spotted a coconut tree with 5 big coconuts on it. After a brief chat with the security lady, she said “if you want to try and get them, go ahead.” CHALLENGE ACCEPTED! All it took was a little bit of team work, and those beautiful coconuts were ours in no time. Andy crouched down and I stood on his shoulders and pulled them down. I wish I could have gotten some pictures, but maybe next time.
Alright, back to the story of our search for everyone else. Peter was staying at the Hilton and the first though that came to mind was - “hey, let’s just ask one of the hotel employees where he is staying.” Great idea! Except... no one knew Peter’s full name. Okay, so that plan was out the window and off we went on our golf cart to keep looking. Wait wait wait... another coconut tree... GET IT! We loaded up on about 8 coconuts and after some driving and searching, we ended up finding everyone by the beach. We made plans to congregate back at our place and we were going to cook up a FEAST of conch for everyone.
When we went back to the conch shack to buy conch, we had some time to kill while waiting, so we played basketball with the locals. Basketball, like 90% of other sports, is definitely not my game. That’s okay, we still had fun running around and getting tired. Once we finally got 3 huge bags of conch, we made our way back to the other island and straight to the kitchen to start working on the food.
We had so much food cooking, it was crazy! Three pots of conch soup, some of which had lobster, as well as frying up conch fritters.
Andy frying up a massive batch of fritters!
Look how much lobster is in this soup! This was an absolutely delicious feast! I had so much soup and sooooo many fritters! I had my fill, and then some; not to mention, all of the leftovers we had, which shows exactly how much food there was.
We immediately kicked off on day three with some fishing. We caught so much fish, it was just crazy! 4 strawberry groupers, a few lane snapper, and a whole lot of yellow tail. The picture above is the smaller set of fish that we cleaned up for dinner. For those that don’t know, there are specific limits on the amount of fish that you can bring back. The rule is either 60 lbs of filet, or 20 demersal fish (bottom feeders) so we ate all of the smaller fish in preparation for this. Check out the yellow tail at the bottom right, that one was huge, but a shark or barracuda took off its entire tail. The fishing was going great, but we got cut off by a huge storm we saw in the distance. We quickly packed up and started to go back in, but the storm was too fast and we got completely soaked. Getting rained on wasn’t the worst part, it was the after effect of being cold in soaking wet clothes, mostly from the windchill.
Remember those coconuts? After a day in the fridge, we tore them up! Andy and his trusty Bubba Blade made short work of them and they were delicious.
Fish fry tonight! Mmm mmm yellow tail! We had a sauce with onions to go with it, which was very similar to sweet and sour.
We also had another batch of steamed fish with soy sauce, scallion and ginger. And yes, if you’re wondering, I cleaned house and ate MOST of the leftovers. I say most, because I don’t always like to eat too much fried food (especially after all of those conch fritters), because it just makes me feel a bit blah for lack of a better word. Either way, I had my fill and we got ready to do some swimming.
We walked over to the infinity pool and took a dip. Here is a picture of Andy and his wife Carolina watching the sunset. It was a nice and relaxing end to the day.
On Saturday morning we headed over to Sunil’s place for breakfast and here is the view from his balcony. We had eggs, pancakes, sausage, bacon, orange juice, fresh fruit, and a few other things for breakfast. I didn’t go wild, I just had a good breakfast as we prepared for another day on the water.
Today’s plans didn’t necessarily include fishing, but it was awesome to see the other things in the area. Our first stop was to snorkel at a big sunken ship, which had fish all over the place (I have some video footage on my youtube page!). One of the really cool parts of this is that someone put up a rope ladder, so a bunch of us climbed up on top of the ship and jumped off into the water. It was a whole lot of fun and after that, we headed off to the grass flats to search for conch, but we were unable to find any.
Next on the agenda was a trip to honeymoon harbor. We parked the boats in the shallows and prepared for some major relaxing.
Look at us, hanging out under an umbrella covered in sunscreen :)
We moved the umbrella into the water - good move! It was much more relaxing sitting down in the water.
A couple of stingrays came by to say hello! Check out Andy’s videos he took:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XN94fkiZaE
It’s time for some FOOD! We took out the grill and got busy cooking up hamburgers and hot dogs. We were cooking for everyone from our little grill and kept bringing out food as it was ready. Wayne loaded up the grill full of burgers and said - “I think everyone is done eating, here, you go ahead and take over.” No problem! I went ahead and asked everyone - “IS ANYONE STILL HUNGRY???? Otherwise I am going to eat all of the rest of the food!” They said go for it and they just had no idea. I already ate a few burgers and hot dogs, but you cant just let this delicious food go to waste. I stacked up my burgers into two triple burgers and hopped into the water to go hang out with everyone while I ate. As you can imagine, a few jaws dropped at the food I had and we had even more people see me in action. I really just like to show off sometimes, it’s just too much fun.
Sunil went searching off the cliffs for anything worth spearfishing. He saw lot of fish, but they were too deep in the rocks, so after a bit of swimming, he got out of the water. We started to get things packed up and decided to do a bit more fishing. Instead of heading out too far, we just went to the opposite side of where we were and dropped down in around 50 feet of water. We were pulling up so much yellow tail, it was just crazy. I know I already posted the videos, but I did not have any pictures, so here is a video of the yellow tail catching in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0F4vn5sqss&index=11&list=PL7JzkOKqZJs1NMRVKOa3fTlaK0yUI6x1m
After catching a bunch of fish, we noticed a storm in the distance, but we really wanted to take another shot at catching a mutton snapper, which was the #1 fish on the to catch list and we never saw any. We anchored up in front of the resort where a group of about 7 other boats were parked and gave it one last chance. One of the adjacent boats showed us a 28 inch mutton they caught, so they are definitely down there. We cut huge bonita chunks and just went all out trying to land a monster, but we didn’t have any luck. The storm was getting too close and we needed to get moving, so we quickly docked up and sorted the fish for dinner. Luckily for us, the moment we tied off the boat, a MASSIVE wind came howling and rain began to pour nonstop. We made it just in time and it would have been absolutely miserable trying to come in any later than we did; hats off to the captain for making the call.
These were all of the fish in the cooler. We took the 20 largest, plus a jack and spanish mackerel (these don’t count as demersal fish) and took the rest inside to clean and eat. Remember what I was saying about how big the fish are over here? Look at how big that grunt is... that is just insane. With all of the burgers and other food we ate during lunch, I don’t think anyone (including myself) had much of an appetite, so we cooked a few fish and finished up any leftovers as we prepared to leave the next morning.
This was such an amazing trip and I would highly recommend for everyone to go to the Bahamas if they ever get a chance. Great fishing and a great time with great people; you cant ask for much more than that. Thank you everyone for all of the memories, until next time!
