Thursday was my first encounter with the Gastronauts, a "club for adventurous eaters" who aren't afraid to stare dinner in the face.
The guest of honor, David Gracer, owns a small Providence-based company called Sunrise Land Shrimp that's dedicated to popularizing entomophagy — eating insects. Thursday's bill of fare, imported from Rhode Island and prepared by several longtime Gastronauts, included crickets, cicadas, and grasshoppers, silkworm and ant pupae, and giant water bugs.
I gave my camera a rest for this event; the grasshopper above, and the water bugs and silkworm pupae below, are from my most recent visit to Southeast Asia. Even given the star treatment in the Gastronauts kitchen, insects may never be more than subsistence fare for me, but I'm always willing to be surprised. Pry apart the exoskeleton of a water bug, and you'll find precious little "meat," but the fragrance and the flavor may remind you of anise, or apples, or even preserved pears!
Nice post, Dave.
I ate silkworms out of a papercup in Seoul a few cold winters back, with a toothpick no less. Not bad, but surprisingly filling. Couldn't finish the whole cup. I had, for some reason, expected them to be crunchy; they turned out, as you probably know, to be more chewy, drenched in a thin dark brown sauce. The grasshoppers I tried, same cold winter only in Tokyo, satisfied the crunch factor, but turned out to be disappointingly and sickeningly sweet, covered in some type of syrup.
P.
Posted by: Polecat | January 19, 2008 at 05:44 PM