This week, we’re proud to launch our new monthly web video series, The Junk Trunk Challenge! We wanted to find a way to show off just how creative we are, and how we often create compelling stories with just a few bits and pieces of info and very little advance warning. Enter the Junk Trunk! Here’s how it works:

1. We invite a guest to fill the Junk Trunk with three random objects.
2. With no prior knowledge of the Trunk’s contents, the staff of Metonymy Media opens the box and brainstorms a story on camera.
3. We publish a video of our creative writers doing their thing, and post it along with the written result of the challenge.

That’s all there is to it! For our first challenge, we invited Caroline, our new social media expert, to fill the Trunk with some random junk and try to stump us. Check out the video below and, once you’ve seen it, be sure to jump down and read the story we wrote based on our brainstorming session!

The Patient Chef, or: How Buddha Got His Belly

by the staff of Metonymy Media

Way back when, in a time before fast food restaurants or all-you-can-eat buffets, there was a young chef named Buddha. This cook would go on to think and do some amazing things, but before he began spending time at one with everything, his quest was to make a wide variety of fresh ingredients into one with great flavor.

One day, Buddha (then still a very lean man) was walking through the market when he happened upon a very large selection of delicious foods to cook. There were succulent fruits, crisp vegetables, savory meats, and all number of spices and aromatics to boot. The merchant told Buddha that he was late for a very big appointment (for, you see, his daughter was to be wed that very morning), and he asked if Buddha would be so kind to take his stock from him and free him to leave early.

“I will give them to you for free,” said the merchant, “so long as you promise to prepare them using this device.” The merchant held up a bright yellow object with a large, glass surface at one end. “I got this while traveling through the South. They call it a torch there – I prefer the term flashlight.”

Buddha grabbed the flashlight from the merchant and turned it on. It was bright, but not very hot, and it would take years to cook any meal worth eating.

“How am I to prepare a feast with just this tiny light?” asked Buddha.

“The secret ingredient to any meal made by flashlight,” smiled the merchant as he began to walk away, “is patience.”

So Buddha took the cart full of food and the flashlight with him and headed back home. Along the way, he stopped at each of his friends’ homes to invite them to a celebration later that evening. They all happily accepted, and Buddha went straight for his kitchen to get to work. He set a pot atop the flashlight and turned it on to begin heating. Over the next many hours, he began cutting the fruits for a pre-meal snack, and he chopped his veggies and diced the meat and prepared a special blend of spices. As he had decided to prepare a stew, he filled the pot (which was a very, very large cauldron with enough space to fit an entire army’s worth of food) with lots of water.

As his guests arrived, he served them some fruit to whet their appetites and returned to his kitchen to wait for the water to boil. Minutes passed, hours even, as Buddha sat alone in the kitchen, listening to his friends laugh and talk outside.

“They say a watched pot never boils,” said Buddha to himself, and he left the kitchen to mingle with his guests. For many hours he sat with them and talked, until some guests grew impatient and demanded their meal.

“Why does Buddha laze around with his guests when we have still not eaten,” yelled one guest angrily.

“Yes, let’s go find dinner elsewhere,” shouted another.

Buddha watched as his friends, tired and hungry, left his party for fuller soup bowls elsewhere. He returned to the kitchen and noticed that the surface of the water had begun to tremble. Buddha then pulled up a stool and watched for many days as the water shook and shimmered and, all at once, burst into a rapid boil above the flashlight. He grabbed his trusty wooden spoon and began scooping veggies and meat and seasonings into the water. He stirred as the water boiled and the kitchen began to fill with the most wonderful smell.

Hungry from his days of waiting, Buddha couldn’t help but tuck in the moment the soup was ready. He used his wooden spoon to eat the stew directly from the pot, and he did not stop until it was all gone. His belly now big and round and full of stew, he stumbled out of the kitchen to find a shady place to relax, and in his very own yard, he found the perfect spot under a tall fig tree. There, he sat, he rested, and he meditated on how great the soup was.

Patience is the best ingredient, he remembered learning from the merchant at the market. He decided that day that he agreed.