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Backyard Gastronomic Adventures

jackrabbit

Author:
jackrabbit

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One of the major TCK traits is our adventuresome-ness in food…

Well, food adventures don’t always have to take place in foreign cultures or countries - ours last night started in our own backyard. My brother found some recipes for grasshoppers (I think the bigger version in other countries is called locusts), and since we’d never tried grasshoppers before (but have had ants), we thought, grasshoppers live wild right here in the fields, so lets catch some! Which my brother and sister did, and brought the grasshoppers home whole and alive, then stuck them in the freezer to kill them. Then, we fried them in butter, and voila, hor d’oevres (appetizers)! I was expecting the grasshoppers to be, well, kind of gooey, but fried they are crunchy and have a nutty flavor. Various members of my family compared the taste to toast, puffed rice, or fried eggs. They have a very nice aftertaste. Now we’re going nuts with recipe ideas - grasshoppers in salad, in pasta, in tempura batter, in omelettes, in melted cheese, in barbeque sauce… Pound them into powder and use them in breads and soups and pemmican… We’re trying to catch as many as we can before winter comes and kills them all off. They’re an excellent source of protein, and hey, it’s free food! I can just imagine the horror of any of our friends though to come over and find us hauling grasshoppers out of the freezer and frying them for breakfast…

Note: grasshoppers should have their legs and wings taken off before eating as these parts could contain parasites.

Now, we’re gleefully trying to figure out where we can get other edible bugs and grubs… We’ve decided that maggots are probably best gotten in bulk from the fishing store (people here use maggots as bait on their hooks to catch fish) since those maggots are fed on fruits and vegetables and are quite healthy to eat. Crickets we figure we can get from the pet food store (people often feed them to their pet snakes, spiders, etc). Pet food stores feed crickets on sawdust and newspaper (I’m not kidding), and this affects the flavor, so it’s best to bring them home live and feed them on vegetables etc for a few days before eating them as they will have better flavor, we’ve been told. I will let you know what maggots and crickets taste like as soon as we’ve tried them (and I’m sure a few of you have already eaten them yourselves).

And we also found out that any fish under three inches can be eaten safely raw, and whole, without needing to be gutted. This means you can eat minnows right out of the stream or pond (providing the water isn’t too badly contaminated, I guess.) I haven’t gotten a chance to try them yet raw (I’ve eaten lots of whole minnows dried and salted), but my brother and sister did - they wen’t down to the creek, caught some minnows, and ate them right there. My sister says they’re not that great whole and raw because their guts are kind of gooey and squishy, she preferred them cooked over the fire. I’ll have to try it for myself and see what I think. Minnows are also free food…

Any of you find yourself eating ’strange’ things out of your backyard?

 Fried grasshoppers:

Minnows:


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October 7, 2008 | Filed Under General Forum 

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Comments

3 Responses to “Backyard Gastronomic Adventures”

  1. 1
    mairabay
    mairabay Says:
    October 7th, 2008 at 6:42 am

    hahaha
    I love the idea of “free food” :D
    and I envy the fact that you can eat fish from a stream nearby because it’s clean. I live in an apartment here in Brazil and not even the water that comes from the tap is clean!

    (Is this spam?)

  2. 2
    kristine
    kristine Says:
    October 8th, 2008 at 8:38 pm

    Hahaha, well, I’m not particularly adventurous. The farthest I’ve gone is frog :P *sigh*

    But hahaha, like Maira, I love the *idea* of free food.

    (Is this spam?)

  3. 3
    miyon
    miyon Says:
    October 16th, 2008 at 10:09 am

    haha this one’s funny. When I lived in Korea (in third grade) I got to try fried crickets. They are solid color when cooked (dark brown) and they are smaller than the ones in your photo. I grimaced my face when I tried cuz I thought it was going to be nasty but like you said they were crunchy.

    In Korea, they sold fried crickets in the market on the street and I believe they still sell cooked chrysalis. For a modernized country like Korea many people may wonder wow really? they eat those? but hey most of the older generations have tried frogs there and I heard their legs taste like chicken XD

    (Is this spam?)

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