It’s not fair that a horrible Mad Scientist should live next door and breed bugs to try and eat us up or kill us off in nasty ways! If anyone’s going to do any eating round here it’s going to be ME. And I thought, if bugs can eat me why can’t I eat bugs? I’m bigger than they are! So I’m going to give it a go, and I’ll keep you updated in my recipe section so you can see how it goes.
Anyway, I went out into the garden to look for bugs to eat, and Mum found me and said couldn’t I be normal for a change? Or at least start on something less disgusting? Then she took me to this shop in town and got me some mealworm flour. The lady in the shop said I could use it to make biscuits. Yum! I think I’ll try chocolate chip.
Oh, these are mealworms. Baby ones, anyway. You eat them when they’re babies, as when they get old they turn into beetles. I want to try eating beetles soon, but these aren’t them. They’re all young and juicy like this (I don’t know if people eat them when they get old and crunchy. Will have to find out!
Chocolate Chip Biscuits with Bug Flour
Ingredients: 100 grams butter, 1 cup sugar (I like brown sugar best, so I’m using that), 1 egg, 1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence, 1 cup normal flour, 1/4 cup mealworm flour (that doesn’t seem very much!), a pinch of salt, 1 teaspoon of baking powder, 1/2 cup chocolate chips (I put more in), 1/2 cup nuts (I like walnuts, so I used those).
What you need to do is beat together the butter and sugar until it’s all thick and creamy and there are no little lumps of butter left. Then dump in everything else all at once (so easy!) and mix together. Put small balls of biscuit on a greased cooking tray and cook for 10 minutes until all nice and brown in the oven at 180 degrees C.
I said I wouldn’t let Jack have any if he didn’t help me wash up. (He doesn’t know there are insects in the biscuits, ha!) He helped.
They were very good, but I couldn’t taste any insect bits, so I was a bit disappointed. I waited till Jack had eaten four before telling him about the insects. He threw up. I wasn’t disappointed any more. Yummy bickies, but I think I’ll try making the flour myself next time. I wonder how?
Mealworm Flour
I found out how to do it! It’s easy.
First, you get some mealworms (we got them at the shop that sold us the flour). They’re all wriggly and ick. Mum said I had to wash them first, so I did – just rinsed them off in the kitchen sink, and then patted them dry with paper towels. Don’t pat too hard, or you’ll squash ‘em.
Next you’ve got to kill them. There’s two ways you can do it – the first way is to drop them into boiling water, but that seems really horrible, even for me. So I put them in a bag and stuck them in the freezer to freeze instead. I didn’t think it would take very long, but left them in for half an hour to be sure. When they came out they were all cold and stiff! Mum said I should cut off their heads so I wouldn’t eat them but you don’t have to, so I didn’t.
Anyway, then you put them in the over for a couple of hours, at about 90 degrees C, or until you can crush them really easily. I burnt my fingers testing them to see if they were done! But once they are, you just drop ‘em all in a blender and WHIZZ!! They crunch up into little bits. Keep the blender crunching until they’re like flour, and there you are. Mealworm flour.
I’m so good at this cooking thing. Not like Jack, but I suppose he can’t help being stupid.
Chocolate-Covered Crickets
Yum! I love chocolate.
The difficult thing here is the crickets. You prepare ‘em exactly like the mealworms, but once you’ve done that you can rip off their heads, legs, and wings if you’re not into bits that get stuck in your teeth like old popcorn. I took ‘em off mine, but made sure a few had everything left on for Jack. Ha! (He went green after one and wouldn’t eat any more. Well, I didn’t want them, so I gave them to Fred. He’ll eat anything.)
Anyway, once you’ve done that, cook ‘em till they’re brown and crunchy – that’s at about 180 degrees C. Melt the chocolate, and dip the crickets into it! Simple. But it’s a bit sticky, and you have to set them on wax-paper to set for a few minutes before you can eat them.
Locust Stew
I wasn’t sure I wanted to try this, it sounds gross. Stew. Ew!!! But Jack brought me back this dusty old book from the library, about pioneers in America, and apparently they use to make this for themselves, when they were really desperate. (Mum makes stew when she has lots of stuff in the cupboards that she wants to use up. And she always makes me sit at the table until I eat it. I hate stew!)
But Jack dared me. I hate Jack.
So, locust stew. A locust is lot like a grasshopper, except we can’t put chocolate on them here. I hate locusts. Anyway, like the chocolate grasshoppers, you pull off the gross bits first. Then the poor pioneers boiled the locusts in salted water (they couldn’t kill ‘em by freezing first, there weren’t any freezers back then). Then they added lots of cut-up old veges, salt, butter, and vinegar. Vinegar? WHY? But they did. And then they ate it. Or, if they were a bit better off, they had it with rice.
It still looks like stew. Gross. Jack didn’t mind it though, for once! He said he couldn’t recognise any of the ingredients. I told him he couldn’t see mealworms in my cookies either, but they still made him hurl. He says he’s got used to the idea of eating things he can’t see.
So he didn’t hurl. But I did. I HATE STEW!!!
