Physical: 100 Season 2

You know how much interest I have in reality shows or even K-dramas, and obviously no K-Pop. I watch some Korean shows, but I don't chase after their sappy soap dramas. I generally like those with a lot of murder and gore, preferably psychological thrillers with low to zero romance. But I'm quite hooked on 'Physical: 100'. Dunno how many seasons it'll go for, but we'll see how long my interest keeps up. 

I finally finished watching 'Physical: 100' Season 2. I was left grimacing, gasping and also amazed by the physical prowess and sheer grit of the competitors, especially the women. Of course competition is brutal, but they pushed through. As much as many are 'retired' athletes, they are still ridiculously strong and fit. In S2, it's pretty clear that many contestants have trained hard for it. I'm also in awe of all the contestants' muscles. Heheh. Here's a nice summary of the contestants on Prestige.

Unsurprisingly, MMA fighters, firefighters, rugby players and CrossFit athletes gain an upper hand. Woo Jin-young, an active CrossFit athlete won in S1. Amotti/Kim Jae Hong is the winner of S2. So much of the quests aren't just about cardio. It's a lot of strength, upper body strength and speed. Damnnn, I wish that by just watching the show, I could gain some muscles too. Hahahahaha.

As much as this is a television show hamming it up for the audiences, it's a pretty good watch. I don't know it if it's truly so in the Korean sporting world, but the contestants are incredibly polite and encouraging. It makes for feel-good television drama in the face of fierce competition. It's such a refreshing change from all the manipulative tactics of other television reality shows.

However, there weren't any women team leaders, and the team leaders don't seem to want any women in their teams, except for three enlightened men. I did wonder how Team Leader Lee Jae-yoon agreed to send a woman out to pull-ups when she could only do six; it's crystal clear that you need to do minimally 20 to be of any help to the team. 

The top four contestants to fight for the coveted #1 (and prize money) were Andre Jin (former national team rugby player), Hong Beom-Seok (former S1 contestant, special forces and firefighter), Justin Harvey (model and actor), and Amotti (YouTube and CrossFit athlete). These are athletes who all have a great grounding in various aspects of sports, which means they have great stamina and flexibility, endurance and mental strength. I cracked up when the top four sat down for a chat and all revealed that they have had surgeries done on various parts of their body joints.

The three-man quest to the top two for the fight to the prize are squats. Wtf are 'infinite squats' anyway?! A 100-kg trough of coal. Fwwwaaaaaah. A woman who's fairly fit can generally squat 75-85kg. But a man can squat 150kg on the average! Weightlifters and CrossFitters would totally have an advantage. These athletes would squat 100kg normally, as a warm-up set. In this quest, the first set of 100-kg squats was 30 reps! OMG. The second set was 150-kg, 40 reps. The third set was 200-kg — Amotti and Hong Beom-Seok could lift it, but Andre Jin couldn't even get up from the squat. Those fast reps were pure insanity. 

Amotti literally said, 

The first set at 100-kg: I live and breathe squats. 

The second set at 150-kg: It wasn't too challenging yet, so I thought doing 30 would be a breeze.

The third set at 200-kg: My legs started to feel strained. It's a matter of willpower at this point.

The quests are tough af. I grimaced all the way through. The pain and the discipline it takes to even get here. Spartan races make a differentiation in the weight of the sandbags for men and women. This show doesn't. You gotta move 40-kg sandbags anyhow, anyway in under nine minutes. Woah. The final quest to the top four is 150-kg metal-roller race; it's not just mad, it's unfair to women. Gawwd. 

If a Season 3 happens, would the show producers tweak it? I doubt it. The final quests would have to be gladiator-drama worthy, which would mean it's very hard for a woman to compete in terms of strength and weight.  Collider's comment about the lack of women representation and unfairness of the later part of the quests to women is so valid.

Season 1's revival match had more women in power as well. ​​​​​Eu-DdeumShim and the other contestants who lost got a second chance. They had to hold a rope carrying their torso and 40 percent of their body weight. The final five people could re-enter the game as a team. Eu-Ddeum had the best form and was one of the people to re-enter the game. Season 2 made it harder for women to re-enter the combat mission. The winner formed his team instead of it coming down to individual performance. Ji-Hyun Jung won and picked former team leaders and the biggest men for his team, like Korean Thanos. This meant all the women got the short end of the stick.

After the montage of women's death matches, we didn't see them highlighted again until the cart quest in "Mine." We saw You-in Jung face off against Jang-kun Lee and Soo-jin Lim. Soo-jin's kept questioning if she could push the carts of 18 sandbags across, and she did it. You-in had a different strategy of loading fewer bags and making more trips. Jang-kun finished first, leaving the women to battle it out. Soo-jin won and talked about the pressure she felt in her interview. "I was really bent on not holding my team back," she said. "And thankfully, I think I managed to pull my weight." All players feel this pressure when it comes to team quests. But that pressure is even worse for women. 

What Even is a Caesar Salad Anymore?

Giggled when I read Ellen Cushing's 'What Even is a Caesar Salad Anymore?' published in The Atlantic on April 17, 2024. Truly. What even is that anymore? Many fine-dining restaurants don't even serve that, unless they want to be labeled as 'boring'. This is such a good read, and fun too.

A 'classic' Casesar salad I remember from my childhood, has become my favorite all-time salad as an adult. Mostly because of the greens used. I generally prefer romaine or butterhead lettuce in salads. I'm not a fan of mixed greens or rocket at all. And I don't like it to be all kale and baby spinach either. 

Isn't it just really, romaine lettuce, Parmesan cheese, and croutons, dressed in a slurry of egg, oil, garlic, salt, Worcestershire sauce, and citrus juice?

It's also the easiest salad to whip up at home. And if you really want, toss a grilled chicken breast or some baked fish atop for a seriously filling meal. A kale salad with pickled red onions, lots of nuts and dried fruit or olives drizzled with some savory dressing isn't a Caesar salad. It gets worse if a restaurant adds cheap synthetic truffle oil or crème fraîche to it.

We are living through an age of unchecked Caesar-salad fraud. Putative Caesars are dressed with yogurt or miso or tequila or lemongrass; they are served with zucchini, orange zest, pig ear, kimchi, poached duck egg, roasted fennel, fried chickpeas, buffalo-cauliflower fritters, tōgarashi-dusted rice crackers. They are missing anchovies, or croutons, or even lettuce. In October, the food magazine Delicious posted a list of “Caesar” recipes that included variations with bacon, maple syrup, and celery; asparagus, fava beans, smoked trout, and dill; and tandoori prawns, prosciutto, kale chips, and mung-bean sprouts. The so-called Caesar at Kitchen Mouse Cafe, in Los Angeles, includes “pickled carrot, radish & coriander seeds, garlicky croutons, crispy oyster mushrooms, lemon dressing.” Molly Baz is a chef, a cookbook author, and a bit of a Caesar obsessive—she owns a pair of sneakers with cae on one tongue and sal on the other—and she put it succinctly when she told me, “There’s been a lot of liberties taken, for better or for worse.”

Restaurants said that in the menu's salad section, a Caesar sells the best, especially if tweaks have been done to it. Nobody wants a salad of rocket leaves or kale. But put random greens into a bowl and sell it as a Caesar? People will order it. 

If I'm hungry but I don't have a craving, I'll just order a cheese toastie (likely brunch or lunch) or a Caesar's salad (in the nights). Most cafes and bistros have that riiiight? It's a super friendly salad. It's savory and to me, fairly hearty. I usually ask for the dressing to be placed at the side because not all cafes do a good one. I'll skip the brainless and eeky Thousand-Island Dressing; I don't even want Kewpie. I'd appreciate a properly tossed anchovy dressing.

To me, a Caesar's must have romaine or butterhead, anchovy dressing or anchovies within, and an egg. And properly grated Parmesan, not the highway diner powdered crap. The kitchen is free to play around with everything else. 

Besides, the more you learn about Caesar salads, the more you come to realize that pedantry is useless. The original Caesar was reportedly made with lime juice instead of lemon. It was prepared tableside and intended to be eaten by hand, like a piece of toast, “arranged on each plate so that you could pick up a leaf by its short end and chew it down bit by bit, then pick up another,” as Julia Child and Jacques Pépin explained in their version of the recipe. It was meant to be dressed in stages, first with oil, then with acid, then with a coddled egg (to coat the lettuce leaves, so the cheese would stick to them), not with the emulsified, mayonnaise-adjacent dressing common today. Crucially, it didn’t have whole anchovies.

As soon as the recipe began showing up in cookbooks, in the early 1940s, it started changing: Some recipes called for rubbing the bowl with garlic, or adding blue cheese or pear vinegar or mustard. In her headnotes for one of the earliest printed versions of the Caesar recipe, published in West Coast Cook Book, in 1952, Helen Evans Brown described the Caesar as “the most talked-of salad of a decade, perhaps of the century.” She then went on to note that “the salad is at its best when kept simple, but as it is invariably made at table, and sometimes by show-offs, it occasionally contains far too many ingredients.” The Caesar is forever, which means it’s forever being manipulated. For better and for worse.

The Brand New GRUB Pasta Kitchen at Bishan Park

What joy it is to have GRUB Pasta Kitchen set up a sheltered al fresco area that is pet-friendly! The bistro is finally back at the beautiful Bishan Park, and it's lovely to sit down for dinner in its new space. I've stopped by twice for dinner! Heh.

I'm sooooo appreciative that this outlet took the effort to secure a SFA Pets-Allowed licence, and even have a sheltered spacious outdoor patio where the floofs could be, and we dine in relative comfort with a few overhead fans. I only hope floof owners be responsible for their tables and keep it clean, neat and at a safe distance for everyone.

They have a pretty decent pasta menu that made me go wheeeee. I wanted to eat every item! I love it that they didn't include spaghetti in the choice of pasta. What for, right. Let's hope that the Bishan customer base won't revolt against this menu, take away everything that I like, and reduce this to yet another inane cafe menu with crap food.

In the end, the uni tagliolini got me. I can never resist uni done this way with chives, pickled shallots, ikura. Also shared a grilled seabass with the man. At $22 for a fillet, this isn't a branzino. But at least it's a local seabass and not some weird dory. Apparently the French onion soup is good. I had a sip of it, but I didn't bother getting a whole bowl. I'm okay with French onion soups, but it's not my favorite kind of soup.

There's the aglio e olio bucatini that I wouldn't mind trying. Unfortunately the only topper offered is prawns. Ugh. They didn't have mushrooms. Hmmmm. I returned to have the basil pork gigli. Gorgeous. Very Thai. It's spicy enough, but I'd love more chilli padi at the side. Oof! 

The Argentinian ribeye is okay since it's priced at $34. It's not mind-blowing but it provides protein. We asked for medium-rare but it arrived medium; this is quite typical of busy bistros that don't specialize in steaks. The tarragon grilled chicken was tasty too. I'm not sure if they offer chicken breast, we didn't ask the kitchen tonight — the cut on our plate was the thigh. What's surprisingly delicious, are the sides of charred broccoli (not burnt and nicely salted) and mash (not watery). The greens are beautifully grilled, and potatoes and butter well-churned. 

Love this space. Bishan Park is a 20-minute drive from home. But, I'll be here at GRUB Pasta Kitchen often, on week days. I have this thing about supporting flood-friendly restaurants that has good food. Oh, and the wine list is super decent. Hehehehe. Of course I had to get an easy bottle of red for both evenings.🍷