STRANGE GRUB - Stir-Fried Sand Fleas...

I probably should have started with the uni post, but this is the first post in what I *PLAN* (and to know me is to know that *plan* means something closer to *hope against my undisciplined behavior patterns*) to be a regular feature in which I eat what I know other people consider to be weird crap, and then write about it.

Though I am utterly humbled by things like Zimmern eating woodworms in the Philippines and Bourdain choking down poopy wildebeest poopchute in Namibia (I think it was wildebeest, anyway), I have always considered myself a fairly adventurous eater. I attribute a good deal of it to having been born in Korea and being introduced at an early age to a lot of food ideas and flavor profiles that most folks here in the US might consider challenging.

Emerita talpoida
aka sand crab
aka mole crab
aka sand flea
aka sea cicada
aka What's For Dinner :)

When I do eat things that make other people go *ewww*, it's out of sincere enjoyment or hope that I will find enjoyment, and not for sport or novelty. I won't eat things on a dare that I don't think have the potential to be delicious to me by whatever complex calculus I derive that it could. So while I have eaten hot vin lon (the Vietnamese version of balut) and enjoyed it, you probably won't find me eating dog soup because I'm pretty sure my emotional attachment to dogs will keep me from tasting whatever kind of yumminess is to be found in a morsel of canine.

I imagine these posts might really gross some people out, but I'm not writing them so much for the ick factor. I'm writing them because this is the truth, if an occasional one, of the way I eat. And because I think it a worthwhile endeavor to explore the idea that the edibility and deliciousness of a thing is very much a mental, social, and cultural construct.

a big'un - about an inch long

Why will I eat an unhatched baby duck but not a baby dog? Why am I more willing to eat these sand crabs that I'm writing about today, which are essentially the beetles or roaches of the sea, than grasshoppers and earthworms of land? Why do people who eat lips and assholes of cows stuffed into a casing think it's gross to eat chicken feet at a dim sum parlor? It is a strange logic indeed by which we decide which grub is too strange to eat, and which not.

If anything, I hope that this post (and hopefully the ones to follow in this series) serves to open minds, my own included, about the things people do or don't eat, will or won't eat, and why.

SPICY THAI CHILI GARLIC SAND FLEAS

Almost certain to be enough to serve the very limited number of people in your life who won't run away and retch at the thought of eating it.

When I first moved to Oceanside and found these critters washed up alive in the sand at the beach, I was reminded of something I had several years ago in Phuket that looked a lot like them. A couple weeks later, I watched Andrew Zimmern eating something very similar on a re-run of Bizarre Foods - Thailand and determined that if I were to find out these suckers were safely edible, which I did, I'd grab a handful the next time I could, and cook them up. Which I also did.

- a handful of sand fleas, soaked and rinsed thoroughly, 4 or 5 times, to get rid of all that sand
- 1 clove garlic, minced
- 2 teaspoons fish sauce
- 1 Tablespoon brown sugar

- 3 Tablespoons oil for frying

- 1 wedge of lime to squeeze over the sand crabs before eating

1) Rinse your handful of sand fleas well and thoroughly, several times, in order to get the sand off their little sand flea persons.

I think I changed the water about five times... 

...to get them this clean.

2) Put them in the fridge for about 20 minutes so they'll fall asleep. *Zzzzzzzzzzzzz...*

3) Make your chili garlic sauce by mixing the chili garlic paste, minced garlic, fish sauce and brown sugar in a small bowl.

4) Heat your oil in a wok over high heat until it's screamin/smokin hot and throw your fleas in.

5) Stir fry them critters 2 to 3 minutes, or until the shells turn completely orange and have been orange for 20 seconds or so.

6) Pour in your chili garlic sauce and toss them little roaches til they're evenly coated.

7) Serve with a healthy squeeze of lime juice and a lot of frosty cold Singha which most of your guests will likely need in order to be able to choke one of these suckers down.

In all seriousness, they taste a lot like little shrimp crossed with soft shell crab if they were deep fried with the shell on and didn't have a lot of meat. Sweet, spicy, sticky, crunchy. Pretty decent beer food if you're not too skeeved by the idea of it to reframe it as food.

Really, folks. It's just a crustacean. Try getting me to eat a cockroach, though, and that's a whole 'nother story.

shinae