Late Night: What’s Bugging You? It’s a Matter of Taste
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There’s a lot to yammer about, from tasty food and eating bugs to whatever is bugging whoever.
I had an unexpected run in with chapulina empanadas at one of Los Angeles’ most popular Oaxacan restaurants which has super hot waiters. That night ours had a spider tattoo on his neck. Anyway my Spanish is pretty marginal, and for some reason I thought chapulinas might be cheese curds. Then the empanadas came and after a couple bites, I went
Oh maybe seeds…?
Then I found a leg, at which point I mentioned to the one dude in our group that these might be crickets. He called over the cute tattooed waiter and asked
Hey, are these crickets?
And the guy replied,
Nah, grasshoppers.
So our hero said
Oh cool, grasshoppers!
slapped some guacamole on the empanada and munched it down, smiling all the while and saving us from the label of sissy gringos. Though I’ll still never order the goat spine in mole.
There’s a really interesting theory about why foods are kosher or not: When things possess the qualities of two things, when they are “neither fish nor fowl” they are unclean or treyf. Take oysters, which look like rocks, but contain a living thing. Or lobsters, crab and shrimp–giant bugs that live in the ocean. Ostriches are birds which run and do not fly, and so on.
lisa!