Nashville: The Peach Festival (aka where Matt won the peach eating contest)
Yes, that's right. Matt enlisted in a peach eating contest for the 2nd Annual 12 South Peach Festival back in June. It was my second day being back in Nashville. And it actually wasn't just him. He persuaded me that it might be fun for me too. So I signed up as well.
I didn't think about it too much until we were walking a mile from where I parked — we thought there wasn't going to be much parking near the event, turns out there was plenty — and I realized I had no idea what an eating contest would be like. As in, what's the strategy? How do you eat quickly? What's it like to purposefully eat fast? Would it be how many you could eat in a certain time period? Or would it be for speed? I didn't practice for this. I couldn't remember the last time I even ate a peach. WHAT DID I SIGN UP FOR??
I asked Matt what his game-plan was. He said simply, "To win."
Well, that seemed simple enough. But um. How?
I seriously was a little freaked out about it. I'm not a slow eater, but I'm not the fastest eater. And I didn't consider the juice dripping all over my hands and mouth trying to take bites of the peach. And although I've taught myself to chew things — as most people I think do — until they've been chewed enough to swallow, in an eating contest, swallowing as many things whole without chewing is probably the way to go.
So you can tell how this turned out?
After Matt surprised me with a Peach Festival t-shirt (which I actually really love — it's one of those really soft fabric shirts, and the design is really cute), we checked in and saw our competition: three other people who also had no idea how this competition was going to go down, and had also never been in an eating contest before. I relaxed a bit.
We had three peaches. Whoever finished all three down to the seed the fastest, won.
We began.
And then we ended.
Because Matt won hands down. Like two peaches ahead of everyone. I was still on my first peach! To this day, I still don't know how he did it. But I'm proud of him. We'd like to say a special thanks to our supporters that day who were there to witness and encourage this.
His win resulted in a huge box of peaches. Peaches for dayyysss.
And while we were eating, some Peach Festival photographer snapped some of the action shots for us (even more Peach Festival photos to see here):
He had so many peaches, that we were unable to eat all of them fast enough — ironically — so we ended up making peach jam. It was my first time making jam and I now know why — it's actually kind of difficult. And I also found out during this process how much sugar is in jam. Probably why it tastes so darn good.
Matt's mom had a brilliant idea of adding some strawberries into it too so we had some combinations of peach + strawberry jam. And because you can just stick it in a freezer until you need it, we still have a couple jars left. One of which was shared at a church potluck recently and we got top notch compliments. #teamwork
You could say things are just peachy.
