Crickets!

We’re obsessed with markets.  Probably the best thing about Asia so far has been the food, mostly made for us by street-side vendors.  Bowls of noodle soup with lots of chilies and fish sauce, skewers of grilled baby octopi, impeccably fresh fruit, endless pad thai.  You name it, we’ve tried it.  As of last week, though, there was one thing we still had to try.  The bug table catches every market-goers eye.  Picture an old lady with ten trays of deep-fried bugs, from maggots to the ubiquitous crickets to giant water bugs the size of rodents.  Obviously we had to see how they were for ourselves.

The perfect moment came in a post-beer wander to the market for snacks.  We picked up all of the strange things we could (vegetarian dumplings, ‘corn tubes’, steam buns with animal faces and so on) before stumbling upon the bug table.  It was now or never.  We spent a buck on a bag of crickets, picked up a few more Changs for liquid courage and headed back to our hostel. 

Somewhat predictably, it was Jessica who ate the first cricket.  Jessica is the husband of our friendship – she squashes spiders with her bare feet, lectures me about slugs (her favourite animal growing up) and rolls her eyes when I freak out about the frogs in the toilet.  Nothing about kingdom Animalia grosses her out, including crunchy deep-fried crickets.  She tossed down two before Nicole or I could even blink.  “Fine.  Kind of greasy.”  She shrugged and knocked back another one.

Some of us needed a little more time.  Nicole and I started slow, first tucking crickets inside of corn tubes and eating the two together, or just chomping on a spare leg or two. For the record, we’re talking a bag of full-size, wriggly crickets here.  Heads, wings, legs… no anatomical detail has been fried out of existence.  Despite this disturbing fact, we both eventually managed to eat a cricket or three without the aid of a corn tube casing.  Nicole even ate the enormous one, which we optimistically named the daddy of the pack.

All in all, we three girls ate a full bag of crickets.  Some of them were a little gushy, but mostly they were just fibrous crunchy earthy things.  It was fine!  We survived!  Eating weird shit is totally the spice of life.  Now if only I could manage a green pepper…

the daddy of the pack was a litttttle chewy.