Posts Tagged ‘insects’

While I was over in Finland, I raided their supermarkets for the sports products they had. Some of it was Finnish, some of it was American. Here is what I found.

Gatorade

I’ve never tried Gatorade before but it thumbs up. I like this stuff. It doesn’t feel as heavy as Lucozade.

Powerade

Another widely sold drink that I’ve never tried. It was good, but I prefer the flavours of Gatorade.

Maxim protein bar

This was very tasty. Almost as tasty as the Carb Killa bars.

Arla protein yoghurt

Chocolate and orange flavour. it definitely has a distinctive taste compared with other yoghurts, but in terms of mixing up my recovery food, I could see myself throwing in some of these.

Tupla protein bar

This not only looks like a Mars bar (but has no relation) but also tastes like a chewy version of a Mars bar. All of which is good.

Cricket protein bar

These are named Leader Zircca bars. Leader is the brand, and zircca is the Finnish word for cricket. Not the game, but the insect. It’s made of crickets: 15 of them go into each bar. They were okay and didn’t taste like you were eating insects, but I haven’t left craving more.

Buffalo worms are small insects that look like tiny maggots. I know, sounds delicious right? I decided to stir-fry them in a fried rice-style dish: garlic, buffalo worms and prawns to start, then I added rice and peas, and finally an egg.

Here is the finished dish:

Buffalo worms do not have much of a flavour, so it tasted a lot like a regular fried rice with prawns.

I ordered some exotic meat from Kezie Foods. They offer a great range of non-mainstream options including horse, kangaroo, camel, crocodile and edible insects.

The problem is that they are delivered via a standard courier. You might wonder how they keep them frozen in transit. The answer seems to be that they do not. They put the products in a polystyrene case that they pack with dry ice. This is supposed to keep everything frozen for 48 hours.

However, when I received their delivery, everything had defrosted. I spoke to their customer services and they were very nice about it, arranging another delivery. The problem is, the exact same thing happened the next time.

Maybe I have somehow misunderstood the definition of frozen. But it feeling exactly like defrosted meat does not seem correct.

So I am giving up. I cooked what I could from the latest batch and will leave it there. At least until I can progress my backup plan of starting an ostrich farm. The products themselves seem good quality: the meat I did manage to eat very good.

Why Not Eat Insects? is a 1885 book by Vincent M. Holt. Surprisingly enough, it is a book advocating the consumption of insects. And why not? They are nutritious, tasty and plentiful.

He starts off by tackling the prejudice against eating them. We think it is a weird yet people all over the world do it. We worry that they will have fed on the wrong stuff, but this is unfounded. Most insects are vegetarians. Compare this to pigs. They will eat anything. Lobsters too. Lobsters are often caught wild and so you have no idea what they have eaten; putrified dead fish being one of their favourite meals.

He then goes on to suggest how to catch, prepare and cook a variety of insects including snails, moths, woodlice, caterpillars and others. He even concludes with some sample menus you could use for a dinner party!

It’s quite a small book; I got through the entire thing in about 45 minutes. It is also a reproduction and suffers from some flaws in the process, so is perfectly readable.

My friend Samra recently bought herself an SRL, so we headed down to the river so I could show her how not to take photographs. I’m hardly a tutor, but it was quite nice to be able to share my tips.