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Pan Roasted Insects

submitted by Roxanne Farrar, Milledgeville, GA, USA, June 2007

Ingredients

• Handful of grub insects and/or larva
• Generous sprinkling of Salt and fresh-ground Pepper.

   

Instructions

1. Heat your skillet on stove-top burner to just shy of “smoking hot”
2. Place your LIVE bugs/grubs on the hot skillet and keep turning quickly to Roast
3. Generous sprinkles of Salt and fresh-ground Pepper
4. Eat immediately!  (Discard excess.)

   At the Bus-Transfer Stop for the DMZ (“Demilitarized Zone”) just south of the Border between the 2 Koreas, I had a half-hour to kill.  It was hot and I thirsty, so I bought a beer. No tables were empty at the outside bus-stop “café”, so I asked an elderly couple if I could sit down at their table, to which they readily agreed.
   As I sat there gulping my nice cold beer, I became curious to know about the snack that they were silently munching on out of Dixie Cups, using toothpicks to single out each morsel.  Finally I just burst out and asked them if I could please have a taste.
   They were thrilled and happy o share and we immediately became “best friends”!  Turns out that the old man was the son of the anciently old lady, and she was a true “Party Girl” in the way she insisted that we kept pouring numerous “refills” for each others’ beers.  (Her son chatted and helped to translate, but did not join in on our numerous toasts, since he was her “Designated Driver.”   We drank numerous toasts in that short ½ hour!
   Anyway, (much to my chagrin), turns out they were munching on roasted INSECTS!
   It would have been too rude not to follow through with my request for a taste, once I saw what I was in for.  So, I just grabbed a toothpick, speared a hot roasted bug out of my new friends’ Dixie Cup, and popped it.
   When I first tasted its flavor, I was pleasantly surprised!  The initial flavor and texture reminded me of nice freshly roasted peanuts.
   But then I bit down, and YUCK! A most disconcerting “squish” occurred as the inner juices of the bug squirted out with an extremely unpleasant (sourly bitter) taste.