Pork Saltimbocca

Original recipe called for serving with polenta but I've always served this up with white rice. I've used pancetta instead of prosciutto and I've used boneless chicken breasts instead of pork depending on what I happened to have in my fridge. While the recipe calls for making 6 servings, I've usually made just half as many chops but used the full cup of broth for making the sauce since people seem to really like this sauce. Simple to make but still impressive enough to serve to guests.

( Click for recipe and bigger photos )

Eating Insects

Y'all can blame zarq for this one. He posted a link to Man Bites Insect (an article in the NY Times). Ever since I was a kid, I've wanted to try chocolate-covered ants and deep-fried crispy crickets. I don't know where I heard of these things but the idea has stayed in the back of my mind. I once saw some lollipops in one of the Smithsonian museums. They looked like regular lollipops except there was an edible insect in the middle so that it looked like a bug trapped in petrified amber. I thought it looked so cool. But it was expensive (for my kid budget) and besides, I was squeamish about the idea of actually eating the bug.

I had always been a timid eater when I was a kid. On one trip back to Taiwan, my sister and I insisted on asking for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for our meals. We begged for PB&J even in restaurants, much to our parents' embarrassment. At least they got to laugh at us when we asked for the fortune cookies at the end. Turns out restaurants in Taiwan don't carry peanut butter and jelly or fortune cookies. ("That's a U.S. thing!" they chortled.)

Fast forward a few decades and now I'll try just about anything. Spicy Salty shrimp with head and shell still on? It's one of my favorite dishes. Black pudding in an Irish breakfast? um...disgusting to think about but ended up being bland to the taste. Gelatinous flesh of a yellow dragon fish head? Weird texture but tastes pretty good. Crispy pork intestine? Shockingly delicious. (but eat it while it's still hot...it's not as amazing once it's cooled down. While it's hot, you've got the crispy skin on the outside circling fatty tissue that just melts in your mouth.)

What changed? Some time in elementary school, I went to a Bible Camp one summer (that's right, Bible Camp...and I had fun too!). I deeply admired one of the women there who had been a missionary somewhere in Africa. She was strong, funny, beautiful, and really nice. I wanted to be just like her. One night she told a story where the local villagers were serving up a feast with the missionaries as their honored guests. At that feast, she was served monkey. She was shocked but she ate it to be polite. My parents had served up some weird foods but they had never served up monkey. So I figured if the missionary lady could eat monkey and still be here, nothing my parents dished up would ever be that bad in comparison.

And slowly, I shifted my eating habits until now I'm more adventurous with eating than I've ever been. So now I'm ready. The guy in the article above, David Gracer, isn't very far from Boston. I called him up and learned he's giving a Edible Insect Talk and Tasting next Thursday, April 17 at the Braintree Public Library. But I don't think I'm going to be able to drive down there in time for that. So...I asked if he'd be willing to come up for another demo some time. That photo above is from his website. It looks kind of like cockroaches but they're actually giant water bugs.

After I hung up with him, I called my boyfriend. I expected him to be excited since he's always looking for unusual dishes to try at restaurants.

"Hey! I found a guy online who says he'll come up and do an Edible Insects Tasting if we can get about a dozen people together!"

silence

"Oh...you don't want to eat bugs?"

"I don't want to eat insects from some random guy you found online...where does he get his insects? Is he capturing the bugs in the wild? You don't want wild bugs...they've probably been sprayed with all kinds of pesticides!"

"I think he's getting his crickets from pet stores. Those crickets have probably been raised in cleaner conditions than most of the meat we've eaten. And sometimes he finds ant pupae and giant waterbugs in some ethnic groceries. Then again, he did mention being excited about an upcoming expected cicada infestation on Cape Cod..." (Plus it occurs to me now that most of our vegetables and fruit have also been sprayed with pesticides.)

"Look, I'll happily eat bugs with you -- but in a restaurant. In a restaurant where they're bound by health code regulations and where we can read reviews about whether or not they've made their patrons sick. Search in New York...I'm sure there's some place there we could go to."

So I'll just have to have the party without him. Because I still want to try this. Anyone out there in the Boston area feel like exploring this with me? Surfing around the web, I find that insects are still eaten in many parts of the world. They're rich in protein and iron and are low in cholesterol. From the environmental angle, they use far fewer of the planet's resources to provide us with food. And talk about bragging rights for unusual foods you've tried!

I did track down one restaurant in Boston. Tu Y Yo has Tacos de Chapulines (deep fried mini tacos stuffed w/grasshoppers, served w/avocado sauce). Do you know of any other restaurants serving insects? This was surprisingly difficult to search for since I kept getting hits for "How to get rid of insects in your restaurant" or "We were disgusted to see an insect in our food" or reports of various health code violations.

So stay tuned. I can't wait until I get a chance to try the grasshopper tacos. Have any of you tried eating insects? If so, what was it like? Tell me all about it. I'm excited to try it but I'm nervous at the same time.

Edited to add: Part 2

( More links for my reference collected here )