A vast array of fried bugs in Bangkok
Roaches at least 3 inches long and fried small birds
Sorry for the lack of posts – traveled a total of over 7 wks (mostly to visit friends and family) and can’t seem to quite recover yet. It doesn’t help that I just started a new full-time job so I’m exhausted as hell. Do you know how hard it is to go through thousands of photos to chose a few to post on a blog? Anyway, enough about me…
Whenever Andrew Zimmerman or Anthony Bourdain go on their tours of Asia, you always see them eating some type of insect so I was really hoping to find some form of cooked insect in Thailand. I was lucky to find this woman, who had a stand on one edge of the Chatuchak Weekend Market in Bangkok and I was quite excited that the variety was so immense! From what I can make out, there are silkworm cocoons, grasshoppers, crickets, and some beetle larvae in the first photo. In the second photo, in the foreground, are the most gigantic cockroaches I’ve ever seen and behind them, looks like some type of small bird (think it’s a chicken that’s not quite mature yet)!! At first I thought that those fried birds were fried bats…all of the items were deep-fried to a golden crisp and nicely garnished with green stuff (pretty sure it’s green onions).
I have had fried beetle larvae (the white ones that look like caterpillars) before, piping hot actually, and even watched crawling ones get plonked into hot oil and ate them soon after! Where the heck was this? Well, this was the last class in the entomology course I took at UC Davis. What did they taste like? French fries.
I was just not that adventurous and the heat (being about 38C and 80%+ humidity) definitely did not help. I just know that even though those huge cockroaches are deep fried, they will probably be a bit…squishy inside – yuck. I don’t mind handling them but eating them…that’s another story.
(Hey Jin, you would’ve been screaming so loudly!! haha)
Desperately Seeking Crab 
OMG!!! That’s disgusting! Where did you see the fried cockroaches? You’re right about me screaming!!! You forgot the part about RUNNING, too!! Yup! SCREAMING & RUNNING!!! LOL!
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I eat just about anything but not INSECTS!
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Haha Jin…wish you were there, would’ve loved to see your reaction!
Oh yeah Jacqui – forgot – Steaming turd vs. Hairy Spider = Steaming turd. hahaha!
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OMG fried cockroaches? That’s gross. I would only eat that if i was starving (like wartime or something and there was no other food…) i would not eat it if i had a choice!
Nice to see you back…i really missed your posts while you were gone Michelle! I hope you’re feeling ok, and getting as much rest as possible. 🙂
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I would love to eat out with you some day! Have you tried snake soup? And hyena meat, and monkey, baboon and the like? We eat a lot of them here in Cameroon. And fried bats!
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Hi Azore! I have a friend from Cameroon so I will ask him if he’s eaten hyenas, monkeys and baboons when he was growing up. No, I have never had snake soup but would try it. I don’t really see the point in eating fried bats unless they are big – some of those bats are so tiny that they wouldn’t have much meat on them.
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