Bugs | Desperately Seeking Crab

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My First Tomatoes of the Season

Posted in Bugs, Garden, tagged caterpillars, gardening, tomatoes on January 27, 2009| 4 Comments »

I had the most beautiful tomato plants this year and I even started them a bit early so that they would have some chance to stay healthy. Last year, because I started them so late, they were burnt from our record hot and long summer. Well, this year, just when I think I’m going to have a great crop then there is a massive infestation of green caterpillars everywhere!! Now, we are in the midst of a long heat wave (so early on too) and I might as well kiss my tomatoes goodbye and start over again.. Gardening can be so rewarding yet so frustrating!

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Insects Anyone?

Posted in Asian, Bangkok, Birds, Bugs, Deep-Fried Food, Snacks, street food, Travel, tagged Andrew Zimmerman, Anthony Bourdain, Bangkok, Chatuchak, Eating Bugs, entomology, entomorphogy, Fried Bugs, Fried Cockroaches, silkworm cocoons on November 8, 2008| 6 Comments »

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)