Alternative Thai Food
Most countries have a national snack. While for people from the UK it will often be 'chips' (French fries), the people from the Isan part of Thailand seem to be very fond of fried insects.
Below is a selection
Fried scorpions and grubs
Fried cockroaches?
Fried grasshoppers
Apparently you need to be careful when partaking of these tasty tit-bits. This is on account of the fact that the insects in question, are often killed in large numbers by using insecticides. What the insects ingest is in turn ingested by the person eating them !
As for the cockroaches, the Thais claim these are not MalangSaab (cockroach) but Mangda (for which there seems to be no equivalent in English). I can assure you though, they look like large cockroaches. Generally the head, the abdomen, the legs and the wings are discarded. The thorax is squeezed firmly and the pressure of the teeth helps the unsightly brown contents to be evacuated into the mouth. The consistency looks to be similar to axle grease, while the technique is rather like that of eating an artichoke leaf.
YUMMY