The South Forty Inches

My garden is pretty much a disaster this year.  The tomato plants started producing late because of the heat and have started dying early just to be perverse.  While the cherry tomatoes were abundant, the large tomatoes--all five of them--probably cost me $25 each. 

The only thing the garden has really successfully produced--besides weeds--is parsley.  While useful, it is hard to build a meal around a plant that is sort of like pubic hair: it's attractive, but you have to push it out of the way before you start to eat.

Even that is now seriously in question.  My parsley is alive with caterpillars, yellow-and-black-striped, big, fat caterpillars.  If it were left to me, I would just spray the plants with Raid and call it good.  (No, I wouldn't worry about pesticides on my food--personally, I think pesticides and cholesterol are probably what give food flavor.)  The Doc, however is about as excited as a boy with a new puppy.  According to her, these ugly worms on steroids will eventually turn into butterflies.  Specifically, Black Swallowtail Butterflies. 

Somehow, The Doc is under the impression that it is okay to sacrifice the parsley crop (you wouldn't believe how much these suckers can eat) so that we can produce a flock of butterflies.  While I admit the butterflies do sort of look like an insect version of the P-38 night interceptors with racing stripes, I can't imagine that they will stay in the back yard long enough for me to even see them after they hatch out.  It is not exactly like a butterfly is useful for anything.

But it has given me an idea.  What would grilled caterpillars taste like?   Think about it--the only thing these bugs have eaten is nice, fresh--and regrettably pesticide-free--parsley.  If you pan-fried them in butter with a lot of garlic and a few chopped scallions....I bet they would taste a little like bacon.  Probably better than escargot.  Linguine a la Lepidoptera. (And it would be an eye-catching dish, too!  Or as the Chinese say: Ho Wok Mei!)

The idea is not as far-fetched as it sounds.  I've eaten fried worms in Mexico.  The Maguey plant--from which we get tequila and mescal--attracts the Tequila Giant Skipper butterfly.  The big red worms that hatch out are considered a delicacy.  While they are often fried and flavoried with lime juice, the best tasting ones can be found in the bottom of a bottle of mescal.

The Doc would never miss a few dozen culled from the herd.  (What is the correct collective noun for a stampede of caterpillars?  In the off chance that no one has yet come up with one--allow me the honor.  From now on, it is a squish of caterpillars.) 

Unfortunately, I would probably find out that pan-fried über worms just taste like chicken.  Lately, everything tastes like chicken--except for chicken and store-bought tomatoes (They both taste like cardboard).

But if the new menu works out as I hope, next year I may just forget all about planting tomatoes, lettuce, and chives, and just plant a few mini-pastures full of parsley for my livestock.  Just in case, I'm working with a pair of noodle-neese pliers and a paperclip to come up with an appropriate micro-branding iron.  Perhaps a flattened W--the Lazy Wiggle.

As a good ol' Texas boy, it is more in my nature to be a rancher than a farmer anyway.