From Wired:
…
The spicy greenish condiment was squirted out of a tube while astronaut Sunita Williams was trying to make a pretend sushi meal with bag-packaged salmon. The three space station crew members are given a certain number of bonus packs of their favorite foods to help endure their months in space where most meals are the equivalent of military MREs.Since everything is weightless, spilled food is no ordinary clean-up challenge.
“We finally got the wasabi smell out after it was flying around everywhere,” Williams told her mother this week in a conversation arranged by Boston radio station WBZ. “We cleaned it up off the walls a little bit.”
…Unfortunately for Williams, the wasabi tube has been banished to a cargo vehicle where it will stay packed away.
“I don’t think we’re going to use it anymore,” she said. “It’s too dangerous.”
My own brush with wasabi. I can’t imagine it loose in a weightless environment.
The infamous “Wasabi Incident”.
I just had to reread your wasabi story, and was laughing just imagining. I have my own kinda funny story about sushi, but it doesn’t have to do with wasabi – it has to do with the stupid pinkish/purplish flower they put on your plate. You might be asking, “What idiot would eat a flower?” So I’ll raise my hand to that one. Sometimes my common sense meter doesn’t detect certain forms of danger. ;) So I was on my very first date ever with this guy who I ended up staying with for a few months – also against my better judgement (the common sense meter must’ve been broken altogether at the time!) – and we went to one of those Hibachi restaurants. This one was right by Dave and Busters in Philadelphia, and frankly it was a lovely place – though not a typical place for a first date. I’m not exactly a frequent eater of Japanese food, but I do like some basic sushi. So I ordered some, and sometime during the night took a bite of the flower – before it burned a huge bonfire in my mouth, throat, eyes, nose, etc. Maybe I was just disoriented by all the weird food on my plate and just figured that eating the flower was no stranger than eating the rest of it!
My brother is very into fine dining, and he really likes sushi. He never lets me forget what I did! Now I just have to find the name of it so that I can warn other clueless people! ;)
If I got to have my favorite foods in space, I would want spaghetti (that would be really messy!), pizza, or any kind of cooked seafood. Somehow I don’t think I’d last long! lol
Like Carrie, I had to go back and reread that post. Too funny!
In recent years, my capacity to endure food that hurts on the way down (and subsequently, on the way out ;o) has diminished a bit. A few day ago, my chef son prepared some nice shell beans from our garden. They were gorgeous. He had a bit of bacon mixed in, and the beans were plump and tasty looking, and had cooked down perfectly, until they were nestled in a creamy sauce … I couldn’t wait to dig right in! Apparently, he had also dropped a few peppers into the mixture, which were well hidden in the creamy dish, and my very first bite hid what must have been a 1/3″ piece of potential atomic annihilation – which immediately ceased to be “potential!”
It’s not safe to eat at my table anymore … *LOL*
Can’t imagine what it would have been like to also have it flying around loose!