Olympic Food Challenge

It can't have failed to come to your attention that very soon the Olympics will be upon us with its wall-to-wall TV coverage of men and women in un-seemly tight clothes running, jumping and generally showing me up as being the slovenly couch potato that I am (although as I mentioned last week, I am trying to get fit...)

But apart from sitting on the sofa waving a little Union Flag and cheering on Team GB, what else could I do to bring me closer to the Olympian Ideal?  Nothing, or so I thought until I got involved in The Olympic Food Challenge!

A Traditional English Sport, taking place on a non-traditional un-rainy day (possibly)

Run by the lovely Ewan over at http://olympicfoodchallenge.blogspot.co.uk/ the challenge is to sample foods from the 204 countries taking part in the games.  Now obviously, this would kill a person (unless he was Jeff Capes, but this is the Olympics, not The World's Stongest Man) so 11 bloggers split the 204 countries between them (That's 19 countries - more or less - for each blogger, I left the complicated maths up to Ewan) and the idea is to make and eat a meal from each country on our list and blog about it every day for the 19 days of the Games.

At Soup Tuesday, our countries are as follows

American Samoa
Antigua and Barbuda
Australia
Bahamas
Chad
China
Cook Islands
Hong Kong
Mali
Niger
Panama
Paraguay
South Korea
Swaziland
Taiwan
Tonga
Turkmenistan
Venezuela
Zambia

Starting on the 25th of July, we will be blogging meals / foods from each of these countries over the 19 days of the games, but until then we will be in some serious research and meal planning (plus trying to find out where some of the countries are)

So I offer a plea to you, my humble readers!  If you or someone you know has ever visited any of the above countries and knows of some amazing dish that is waiting to be unveiled to the wider food blogging world, then please get in touch and tell us about it, and we will have a crack at cooking it.

In the meantime,  pop on over to the Olympic Food Blog to find out about all the other bloggers taking part (why not make friends with them too, possibly on twitter - this thing even has it's own hashtag #olympicfoodchallenge) and also... Go Team GB!