i've also been slowly building up on knowledge about wild foods. foraging mostly for mushrooms and plants. the combination of these events reminded me of bug hunting in thailand, where we went out with flashlights in the middle of the night and collected grasshoppers and shiny green beetles. which are actually a type of junebug, genus phyllophaga...i think. there aren't many look alikes, so it's pretty foolproof to eat these.
last night i went on a mission to look for more of these little critters. the first shrub i looked at right outside my house a quite a few of them munching away. i'm not sure what kind of shrub it is, but here it is.
i collected them with my flashlight (i didn't want to touch them), and put them in a jar.
i stared at them for a few minutes, panicking. after i got over the fear of looking at bugs, i wrapped them up in a sheet of foil. then i toasted them in a fire. i heard some popping sounds, and i hoped that they were done.
peeling off the wings and the head and legs was a bit traumatizing. i started off using tweezers to dissect them. that and looking at the finished product before eating it took up the bulk of the time.
my first june bug was a chocolate covered one. it tasted like chocolate, with something crunchy getting stuck in my teeth.
the next bug i ate by itself. this was one of the scariest things i've ever done!! but it's really not scary at all. it's light and crunchy with a light savory, nutty flavor. the texture isn't that bad either. they'd be really good on a salad...
dude, I don't even think you had to take off the head or the legs.
ReplyDeleteOops, I was accidently still signed into my KKEI account. That was Vanessa, Not bree.
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