Cicadas in Jinan

I love the sound of cicadas. I remember my first trip to Asia many years ago, mid-summer in Kyoto, Japan. I was a typical first-timer, taking pics of everything in sight. But one day I was hiking in a rural mountain area, and the sound of cicadas in the trees was so mesmerizing, I shut my camera and bought a cheap tape recorder. For the rest of the trip I recorded sounds instead of snap-shots. The sound of cicadas didn't leave my mind for months after that trip. Years later, I still remember the sound, and I look forward to it every summer I'm in Asia.



The cicadas make a different sound rhythm in China, at least in Shanghai, where I spend most of my time lately. But I still like it. It's more of a drone here, compared to the rising-falling hum-buzz of the Kyoto cicadas. Turns out there are many different varieties of cicadas, and each has their own sound.

Some cicada fans have made a website about to their favorite bugs -- Cicada Mania: "Dedicated to cicadas, the most amazing insects in the world."

I'd heard a few times that people sometimes eat these insects, but I hadn't ever seen them on the menu until my recent trip to the cold harsh north.

I had a DJ gig in a nightclub in a second-tier Chinese city called Jinan. Jinan is in Shandong province, and is, I guess, about 5 hours south of Beijing by train. At a restaurant here in Jinan, I checked out the fish tanks and vegetable crates that serve as a menu. A lot of the hotel restaurants and banquet places in China have these areas -- crates and tanks of live animals (mostly fish and seafood, but sometimes more -- more on this in another article), and sample plates of prepared dishes (sometimes plastic versions like you see everywhere in Japan). Anyway, at this Jinan restaurant, there were two items that were easily identifiable as "weird." Scorpions and cicadas. Live ones. The scorpions were really small ones, dull brown, almost colorless critters. I'd already had big black ones, and I wasn't really doing the ordering so I politely ignored them. My host did catch me looking at the cicadas crawling around in a bucket, however, and challenged me to try it. Little did he know, I'm the Weird Meat guy!



So minutes later, we had a huge plate of fried bugs. I'd say about a hundred of these little bite-size insects were deep-fried crispy. Everyone liked them. Even my friend Boya from Texas, usually not as adventurous a diner, enjoyed them.

At one point during our stay in Jinan, I suggested trying some street food. Mr. Boya wasn't into that. So we popped into the safe, global-standard KFC for some chicken nuggets -- and had to spit the first one out as it was raw in the center. Hahah, the irony. Maybe the safer stuff is on the dirty streets.

Let me be frank. Jinan is a boring town. There's not much to do there. I sulked around the new shopping mall district, disgusted with the crass new buildings and pointless, stupid shops. I did find a maze of back alleys behind these tacky new malls, that were bustling with street food. Had a nice bowl of soup with fresh hand-pulled noodles underneath an overpass. Also a really good bbq skewer of quail eggs.

As we were running to catch our plane at the modern Jinan airport, we noticed an airport lobby restaurant had "dog meat and flesh" on the menu, under the "chicken meat and flesh" and "beef meat and flesh".

Anthony Bourdain's "A Cook's Tour"

The subtitle is "Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines" but the real goal is a mildly macho food travel show, not shock value. We like Mr. Bourdain -- he's funny, idiosyncratic, and opinionated. But why is he whining like a wussy when he has to eat bird's nest soup, natto, or mountain potato? We've eaten all these things in our home country, America, and we didn't freak out about it, even long before we began the Weird Meat Project. Our favorite suburban sushi chef dishes out natto and mountain potato all the time, and plenty of white people eat it and even ask for it. I even cook with satoimo mountain potato or yamaimo mountain yam at home, my local grocer carries them in California. They're white and slimey like semen, but we like how the stuff soaks up sauces and provides a unique contrasting texture on top of a crunchy or chewy dish.



Natto we like for breakfast. We buy small cases of it in the frozen section. It is kind of a chore to eat it without being messy, but the flavor is worth it, especially mixed with hot mustard and MSG broth. It also feels nourishing and healthy and we know that's not macho, but whatever, we like a dose of good-for-us-ness from time to time. Like listening to jazz.

We agree with Jeffrey Steingarten's method of trying everything multiple times before deciding if it's good or not. We've tried a lot of food that didn't impress us on the first try, and kept an open mind about it. Give it another go. Taste is acquired. There are millions of people who enjoy natto -- are you sure it's bad after one try? What about from a different chef or producer, or in a different setting?

Now, we have found some things that are simply bad, even after many many tries and in different settings. As we've mentioned many many times before, Shanghainese food is one of these sad bad things -- it's just not good. And even though we shrugged off warnings from Chinese and foreign friends alike, we finally have to admit that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, good about baijiu. Báijiǔ is the strong, sweet clear wine that is to China what vodka is to Russia or sake is to Japan. Tastes like gasoline with sugar.



Speaking of disgusting things, I guess I'm obsessed, but I was "treated" to another Shanghainese meal the other night. Shanghainese food is sadistic. One dish, for example, was ... pork cuts, deep-fried with crunchy corn meal. Over that, they poured a sickly sweet mayonaise, and then -- the horror -- they sprinkled those little rainbow-sprinkles that kids like to put on cheap ice cream sundaes. It doesn't get weirder than that, nor more unpalatable. Give me natto! There's a lot of talk about the joys of mixing east and west cuisines, but this is what they came up with?

Pig Brains at 4am

After another legendary party night at my current favorite bar / live music club 4 Live, I got pulled into late-night eats with my drunken friends. We ended up meeting another group at some OK hot pot place in Hongqiao. I have no idea where. It was 4am and we were all drunk. Good idea to eat a bit to soak up the beer before bed.

About 15 people were at the table, and I had no idea who was ordering the food. And more beer, of course. An endless procession of dishes -- big leafy greens, tofu-type skewer things, various meats and mushrooms -- and then, a plate of slimy pink blobs. I started to sober up. As I've said before, I'm into weird, but I'm not crazy about animal brains. These, as I suspected, turned out to be pig brains.



We picked up the plate and slid the mushy brains into the boiling pot. Half in the spicy broth, half in the mild. We let them stew for a while before digging them out, steaming and soaked with flavor. It's difficult to eat slimy brains with chopsticks, so we had to scoop them out of a bowl held up to our mouths. They were soft and succulent like soft tofu.

Despite our lack of enthusiasm for eating brains, these were fine, we had seconds, and we wouldn't turn them down again. Besides, we've had them before, pig brains in Cambodia.