I have eaten bugs when I was traveling. Tasted great.

No different than eating mud bugs (crawl daddy), crabs, lobsters, etc.

dcarch

Bugs come after I get up the nerve to eat the deer meat my son had processed a few weeks ago. So set in our ways...

dcarch, How were they prepared? I bet they are on this &*$#@ diet. It's all about lean protein and lots and lots of lettuce.

I've had fried grasshoppers in Oaxaca. They were served with chili powder and lime juice, and all I could taste were the chili and lime juice, but they were crunchy.

I recommended someone on the chili forum to catch and fry the grasshoppers that were eating his chilies, as the grasshoppers will taste like whatever plants and vegetables they have been eating, but he passed on that suggestion. Others in that forum thought that I had a good idea.

I'm not keen on eating any other insects or arachnids, even if spiders or scorpions may taste nutty. I've also had chocolate covered bees, and they were a waste of chocolate.

Lars

Locusts are kosher. :)

Really, I doubt insects have much flavor on their own. I have eaten escargots (not kosher). The legs are bothersome. The sauce is wonderful. Put the same sauce on rustic dumplings or black bean cakes and I'll like it just as much.

If there were nothing else to eat, I wouldn't hesitate to eat bugs, but it seems silly when one has many nicer choices.

Regardless of the actual point of Make Room! Make Room!, they could certainly make the equivalent of soylent green out of bugs. Good protein and all. And they don't seem to mind having their territory overrun by people.

Chocolate covered bugs

I had crickets in the Pink District of Mexico City served as croutons on my salad.

/tricia

I just wonder where Oldfixer is hanging out and gets to see so many people happily eating bugs?

I don't recall, except on TV seeing anyone eating bugs.

Plllog, what legs are bothersome? On bugs?

Tricia, nice to see you here. How are you?

~Ann

I have eaten escargots (not kosher). The legs are bothersome. The sauce is wonderful

Escargots have legs? Have I been under a misapprehension all these years?

BTW, OldFixer, you do know that the USDA has maximum insect part allowances for everything from flour to chocolate? It wouldn't be the first time you've eaten bugs.

Not fond of wild game either. Cooked, and threw out, a duck. Lean Deer will do, if camouflaged under a drum of hot sauce in Chili. Will pass on the idea to help get rid of Roaches. With allowances, guess I'll have to start eating in the dark.

I've swallowed a bug or two and don't we all eat a certain percentage of bugs in our flours and grains? If I were an aborigine, I might think grubs delectable. It's all relative.
Many cultures are repulsed by our love of cheese...

Yes, snails have a leg, upon which is a foot. They're known as monopods (one foot) or gastropods (tummy foot). The leg is in the middle of the body that is outside of the shell as it moves along.

The thing is, escargots are fed flour for a few days to clear out their systems. They're removed from the shell and everything is cleaned and very nice. But the leg remains. So there's this almost fluffy morsel of tender meat, with a wiry little foot on your tongue or sticking in your teeth. :) Joke. They don't usually stick in your teeth. But they're perceptible. Everything is all deliciousness and cloud softness, and then there's this little foot. (Ergo, problematic.)

Escargots could be worth it (though I'm really in it for the sauce), but they've turned me off to bug legs.

Tricia, I forgot about the crickets. They're pretty good when fried crisp. :) I don't remember the legs. They were either off or melded to the body during frying.

I do snails for my husband because he loves them, but I don't so I have prawns in the same butter which are delicious, have no legs when peeled and don't stick in your teeth.
Having said that, my husband says that there is no hard foot on a french snail so you must have some sturdier types in America.
If you want to prepare your own, put them in a breathable container with a carrot. At the end of the day, hose them clean and replace the carrot. Repeat the precedure for four or five days, or until the snail poop is well orange - proof that there is nothing but carrot in the snail! Then put them in the fridge so they go fast asleep, then cook as you like.

I used to make them here, until DH told me that I could cook pieces of sponge, or, for that matter, tennis shoes, in the same sauce and he would probably enjoy the dish just as much. Anyway, I do love snails, but butter is not on this diet.

And the deep fried insects wouldn't work either.

A snail is very unhappy about his sluggish slimy image. Determined to change that, he decides to buy a super cool high horse power imported sports car.

In the foreign car showroom, the super âÂÂSâ model convertible really got his attention.

So he asked to test drive the vehicle.

Turning on the ignition key, âÂÂWhoooom, WHOOOOM------------"âÂÂ

Shifting in gear and the snail floors the gas pedal.

A huge cloud of smoke from the burning of rubber trailing the fancy âÂÂSâ machine.

All the pedestrians are astonished, âÂÂOMG! Look at that S car go!!!âÂÂ

dcarch

LOL, dcarch.

Plllog, this is very interesting. I wonder if it's a regional thing, but the few times I've had escargot they've either been pounded or deboned, as it were, so no foot.

Honestly can't say I care for them much--to me they're kind of like, oh, tripes a la mode de Caen, say--a great way to use something if you're going to cook it anyway, but not worth any extra effort to obtain the necessary materials. At least the tripe is using up something you've already got as a by-product rather than going to a lot of work to get and prepare it.

Incidentally, back on topic, I seem to remember quite a fad for chocolate covered ants back in my youth, although they never came in my way--they were quite expensive, as I recall.

Plllog, the crickets were fried and quite spicy. The legs were still attached but the whole cricket was just popped in one's mouth and since a cricket is crunchy anyway the legs blended in with the whole bite. :)

Ann, I'm still here. Just bought a Vita-Mix this morning. Hope it helps make eating easier.

/Tricia

Vita-Mix should grind up those legs, but wouldn't make eating them any easier. A raw Cricket is crunchy too? UGH.

OF, now now...don' t uck it 'till you've tried it! Actually, insects would not be my first protein choice either. :). But hey, when in Rome....

/tricia

Well, I like lobster a lot, and that's pretty much just a giant bug, and shrimp are very much bug-like too.

I don't care for escargot, so I guess I'd eat an insect more quickly than I'd eat a snail, although the only ones I've tried have been canned, so maybe fresh ones are better.

Truthfully, the thought of eating insects doesn't bother me, although one of the reasons I started growing a garden and canning my own food was a friend who worked for the Gerber baby food company and explained the percentage of "particulate matter" allowable in all canned foods. That's bugs, hair, twigs, leaves, old band aids, rodent droppings, whatever. Yup, it's all in there, so a stray bug or too doesn't bother me much, other than the crunchy texture of the exo-skeleton.

Annie

Oh, dear, Annie! I didn't even know they made canned escargots. That's very different from freshly prepared by a star chef with an amazing wine sauce.

Compare national brand tin can green beans to your own home canned green beans to fresh from the garden green beans with an amazing sauce....

Tricia, that's the way the crickets were prepared, yes, but the legs weren't obvious. I have a thing about legs... Thanks for the reminder!

Ladybugs are very bitter.......accidentally got one in my mouth when in PE class in hign school over 50 years ago.

I have never consciously eaten a bug! Oh no!

I do eat shrimp, crabs, and lobster; Wes tells me they are "bugs." No; in my mind they're not! They're "seafood!"

I don't eat creepy crawlies!

When I lived in Spain there was a little bodega in the ground floor of my apartment complex. They sold wine - offered from three huge (taller than me) wooden barrels - white, rose, and red. No bottles; no fancy names. You brought your own container, from 4 ozs. to five or more gallons, and they filled it for you.

They also offered fresh garlic, onions, olive oils, olives, and gigantic lemons - and a huge half-barrel filled with live snails.

Huge, live snails. There was a bead of salt along the top of the barrel to keep them inside.

The lemons, oils, and garlic were all displayed in smaller half-barrels around the snail barrel.

I just couldn't bring myself to try them.

Depending on the day, they would sometimes bake fresh bread, too. That was it - three wines, garlic, olive oil, onions, olives, lemons, snails - and rustic bread on whim. It was a wonderful shop and had been in business for decades.

I did eat a roasted sheep's eyeball and tongue. I also tried, and really liked, a tapas dish of tiny whole octopi cooked in their ink and garlic.

This post was edited by caroline on Sun, Nov 2, 14 at 15:04

I love octopus, especially in fritto misto.

"Chocolate-covered bugs." Really?

I'm game.

Sol

Plllog, I like wine even less than I liked the canned snails, but I'd try them again with some other sauce, probably. And I love octopus and squid.

Sol, I'd also go for the chocolate covered bugs, especially if it's nice dark chocolate. I did eat a candy covered cricket once. I was chaperoning Ashley's 3rd grade class trip to the museum and she bought a sucker with a cricket inside. There was much hooting and hollering as Ashley licked the sucker and avoided the cricket until I said "what's wrong, you won't eat the cricket?" That caused a chorus of "Well, then, YOU eat the cricket". With a bus full of 3rd graders, you'd better never let them see you flinch, so I ate the sucker, cricket and all. It wasn't bad, it tasted a lot like sugar, LOL, and the sucker was crunchy so the texture was unnoticeable. After that, for years I was "Ashley's Mom, you know, the one who ate the cricket". (grin)

Annie

Well, I see the BBC is advocating tasty insects, too:

Here is a link that might be useful: Bug tastings in Britan

Thing is, most places where they have a tradition of eating bugs, they're for poor people and not really part of the cuisine, though occasionally things like the Mexican crickets, escargots and oysters get elevated, at least somewhat. Yes, oysters. They used to be extremely plentiful on the US eastern shores, and were considered food for the poor, who could just pick them up for free. That's even how they got into oyster dressing for Thanksgiving.

I've read about how problem solving experts went to rural Viet Nam to see if they could help with the nutrition for children where standard NGO's hadn't made much headway. The problem solvers studied what the parents of thriving children were doing and found that they'd feed them the tiny shrimp that grew ... in the rice paddies? Or cricks? I don't remember the water, but everyone had access to it and the tiny shrimp were very plentiful. The ones who didn't feed them to their children didn't think they were "proper" food--just "bugs"--but when told it would make the kids healthy, were glad enough to start giving shrimp to them. And it's something within their own way of life rather than a delivery from afar. It worked. As they say, bugs are good protein. :)

Annie, I think you're very cool for being the cricket eating mom. :)

We love squid ink pasta. It's always on my must-get list when we go to Boston for an afternoon. Been unable to find it locally although I'm pretty sure it's available somewhere in RI. Squid ink pasta, marinara sauce with scallops, lobster, and chunks of cod is a favorite meal in our house usually served for something special like a birthday or anniversary dinner.

/tricia