So, I recently changed the name of my blog to Arthropoda. The only people who would know this are those still following me. Those people, few or none, are the only ones who might notice, or they might not if they're the type to subscribe to a hundred blogs. They probably are that type. I never told anyone I know personally about this blog. That used to be because I just wanted to talk about anything here and describe my inner feelings. I'm still probably going to do that a little, but in a more structured way. "Arthropoda" is the name of a real project I've been planning for years and will be the name of my insect cookbook. A few other insect cookbooks exist, but unlike those, this one will not be centered around novelty. Some other insect cookbooks that exist are these:
Eat-a-bug is all novelty. Look at that cover! How much more sensational can you get? Sure, it's fun if you're not taking it seriously, and that's fine, but I guess mine will be for a more serious demographic.
Creepy Crawly Cuisine is definitely better. It's still a little dependent on novelty, but again, that does make it a fun read for people not totally serious about eating bugs.
I'm not saying novelty is a bad thing at all. It gets people interested. But, a book needs more than novelty to be actually useful. Both of these books do have good facts. Eat-a-bug doesn't take itself seriously at all, which bothers me if only because it means people who read that book probably won't begin to take culinary insects seriously either. Creepy Crawly Cuisine is nice because it never really seems to be joking at its own expense (taking the piss! I'm not British). There are so many great tables of nutrition information, distribution, and more! And, the recipes are interesting and actually take into consideration the flavor of the insect with the other ingredients used. The best Eat-a-bug does is add bugs to existing foods somewhat willy nilly. The only real issue with Creepy Crawly Cuisine is that it isn't very accessible to people who aren't ready to get super serious about cooking with bugs. The recipes are incredibly diverse, so much so that a different type of insect is used in almost every recipe, and some of them are pretty hard to obtain. That's okay, no points off! It's great that a book like this exists in the first place, and variety is great. It just means the people between demographics have trouble getting started. How do they know they'll like this sort of thing at all? Should they first try Stink Bugs in Green Sauce or a Teclates Omelette? It can be a little intimidating. What I want to do is make a book that isn't at all intimidating but is still totally serious about the subject. I want to figure out lots of recipes with easy stuff like crickets, mealworms, and waxworms (all of these happen to be favorite ingredients at the Audubon Insectarium in New Orleans, where I read these two books and first got some experience cooking bugs). I don't want to mask the flavor of the bugs like how Eat-a-bug seems to try to do, but actually use them as a real ingredient that deserves to exist in the culinary world.
Blogger has a really low limit on image size for a background, so this web thing is the best I could figure out how to do in a day. If there's some secret to it, feel free to let me know what it is. I have great potential backgrounds, but they all look awful or have to be tiled if I'm going below whatever it was, 300 KB I believe. When I first found this blog again last week, my old layout was pretty fucked, bad formatting and broken widgets everywhere.
No comments:
Post a Comment