Ruud Kleinpaste: Dinner from the Garden

Published Dec 6, 2024, 11:18 PM

This is the moment when adult Huhu Beetles emerge from their rotting logs. If you are nearby a forest (especially a pine forest) you will be familiar with the sharp collision noises on your kitchen window when preparing dinner. Those huhu beetles fly towards the light and crash audibly.  

They’ve spent a few years as huhu grubs in dead wood, where they help with the decomposition – ashes to ashes, dust to dust!  

The grubs, of course, are a famous New Zealand delicacy: massive bits of protein can be quickly fried in a pan with a bit of salt and pepper (or even other fancy condiments). Just be prepared to prick a few holes in the body of this massive grub so that you won’t get any exploding internal body segments! Happened to me – just look at my kitchen ceiling!  

Some kids would be keen to help you out in the kitchen – it’s practical curricular topic to discuss the necessary search for alternative proteins in our country.  

Talking about alternative proteins: Slugs and Snails are a real pest in the garden at this time of the year – moisture and new plant growth encourages them, and eggshell barriers don’t work at all  

Control measures that work:   

Weed control will expose them to predators (thrushes). Give your local song thrush (which might be nesting in or near your garden) an “anvil” to smack the shells of snails on – a large flat (decorative!) rock is perfect. 

Using Bait pellets in a pottle dug into soil. A take-away container with lid on and bait inside, with holes cut in the side of the container to let slugs and snails in but prevent dogs and cats from getting at the bait. 

An alternative version is to use some off cuts (15-30 cm long) of plastic wastepipe with a diameter of 50 to 75mm, which allows access to slugs and snails, but not to birds. Put some bait in the pipes and anchor them down with a heavy brick. They also love to hide in half grapefruit skins (upside-down). 

Encourage Carabid beetles (Ground beetles) – they often feed on slugs and snail juveniles and eggs. 

“Hunt-and-kill evening” with the kids (at full moon?) – always a good excursion after dinner. Grab a headlight torch and a bucket to collect them in… night sleuthing! Remember: these hermaphrodites can produce a few hundred eggs each, so reducing populations now makes good sense.  

Trapping under cloth, planks, and other artificial cover. Slugs and snails love that cover as it increases relative humidity and stops them from drying out. 

Around the wooden outside of raised beds, put a strip of copper foil, almost all the way around, plus a sizeable 6 Volt battery providing power to both ends of the copper strip. This creates a nice current that they are reluctant to cross, and it protects your vegies/seedlings. 

But... why not eat them?  

In France, the brown garden snail (originally from North Africa) is the second-preferred species of escargot for human consumption.  

Collect the fattest ones and eat them! That will make you an invasivore!  

 

Escargot - pourquoi pas?  

Cantareus aspersus is, to us, an exotic species of snail. It is commonly accepted that it was introduced to New Zealand by the French around the early 1860s. The reason for this is really simple: the brown garden snail is highly prized as escargot in the Mediterranean region. In fact, it has always been the preferred back-up for the slightly larger, but closely related vineyard snail (Helix pomatia).  

Recently I read that European populations of Cantareus have become depleted as a result of non-sustainable over-harvesting of wild specimens. These days the species is the subject of heliciculture, the captive rearing of these delicacies, also known as snail farming.  

I suppose there may be a few people out there who can set aside the horrific idea of eating invertebrates (quelle horreur!) and who would like to be part of the latest ecological craze of harvesting a truly wonderful resource that yields fat-free, cholesterol-free protein from the comfort of your own back yard.  

I have tried this recipe many times and demonstrated it on live television with consenting adults (Good Morning show) and absolutely wildly enthusiastic kids (What Now?).  

Snail control á la Gourmet involves collecting the finest, fittest and fattest garden snails from the threatened garden areas. Put them in big jars and "starve" them for 4 to 5 days on old white bread. This "starving" is an important procedure.   

As you will undoubtedly remember from experiments, carried out at your primary school's nature table, the snails have a habit of excreting dark, stringy poopy-plops. I think it's time to inform you of the fact that these dark, stringy poopy-plops will have to be evacuated from the snail's gut system before cooking, simply because they taste like… yes, they taste rather bad!  

White bread will slowly replace the dark excrement, and it improves the taste of the final escargot beyond belief!   

Put a big pot of water on to boil and chuck all these "starved" snails into the boiling water. Simmer them for about 3 minutes (boil the water first before launching the snails - do not over-cook the snails, for they will turn out tasting like rubber bands!). 

Take the snails out, leave them to cool off (otherwise you'll burn your hands).  

Remove the bodies from their long-term residence with eyebrow tweezers or entomological forceps. This is known in the trade as a "forceps delivery".  

Then fry them for perhaps 4 to 5 minutes in some simple garlic butter. Do not fry too long, because they will turn out like garlic-flavoured rubber bands. 

Recently, Allyson Gofton made a very helpful suggestion to even further improve the culinary effort of our pest control: "starve" the snails on garlic bread, so that they are automatically marinated while alive!  

Voilá, this is my recipe for the Bugman's Escargot.   

You can serve them in their own shells (remember to make a mental note of which snail came from which shell, otherwise fights may break out).  

In any case I can recommend them with a 1965 Chateau Tahbilk - they go well together  

Bon Appetit! 

 

LISTEN ABOVE 

You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack Tame podcast from News Talks. They'd be road climb pass good morning.

Than very good morning to you, Franciska. Would do you are angry? Yeah?

Do you know what I was? I was, no, So I love to eat out of my garden with the range of lettuces at the moment providing beautiful fresh salads, and the spring onions and the cucumbers are taking off, and the tomatoes are growing, and and then you've got some other suggestions for us, which I'm not quite too sure whether I'm.

Up for, to be honest with you, No, I know, but I just I was going to talk about, you know, what all these things do in your game, and these creepy crawlies and slugs and snails and crabbed beetles and who who grubb?

I said to my Whoho beetles are flying around and if you notice, if you're cooking at night and you've got your light on in the kitchen, these huhu beetles are literally smecking into your window. I always find it really exciting going bang crash, there they come, you know. And then I thought, you know what I should really talk about?

That.

But then, of course, because I knew you were be doing the gig today, I thought, I'm going to change this a little bit, because who beetles? They bite, by the way, if you pick them up, it's really cool. But the point, of course is that if you talk about who beatles, everybody goes says, what about who hoo grubs? And here we go. If we are looking at our planet and we are having a hell of a lot of cows and sheep everywhere, and meadows and all that sort of stuff, and if we're looking for alternative versions of protein, morey, we're eating whoho grubs. A long long time ago, then I thought I'd make that point clear here on this particular program.

Look, I think if I was like the Wild the Wild Foods Festival and hockeyec Out, I think I'd be all up for doing it. But I'm not sure I can quite trust myself to go in the gun and give myself who grab or a snail and cook it up myself. When it comes to the snails, you're just talking about the general garden variety snail that's in our backyards that we can cook up.

Francisca, the French important snail from north from Africa, North Africa, and they took it to Europe and they called it escargo. That snail escaped to Belgium, to the Netherlands, to England, to Italy and Spain and places like that, and a lot of those local groups were eating those snails. Guess what happened About one hundred and fifty years ago. People arrived from Europe with their plants in their suitcases and all that sort of stuff to New Zealand and introduced that same snail into our TIUROA.

Very well traveled species. How would you cook them?

How do you cook them?

Well, it's very simple that don't forget people. If you want to have a look at the website, there's a complete if you like, treaty on how you eat them and things like that. What I would do is you, first, if you like, feed them something not plant material, but something like stale bread, which means that their guts are being cleansed by the stale bread. So the pools, which are normally black, will turn white after three or four days. That means they're ready to cook. Then fall fighter's in boiling water not longer. Otherwise they taste like rubber bands. What you do then, is you go to your medicine cabinet and get the tweezes that you use for your eyebrows, and you pull those things out of the shells, making sure that you remember which body which is by now dead and cooked almost belongs to watch which shell if you like, because later on in plating up that's quite important. Then you put some garlic butter on the inner pen and you quickly fry them for another three or four minutes, no longer, otherwise they taste like garlic flavored rubber bands. And then you can put those little bodies back into the shell and basically play them up with wonderful materials like and all sorts of other than pieces, and you can actually eat that very simply and very wisely.

The protein, I presume good protein.

Yeah, it is absolutely brilliant protein.

Have you ever coocked up the Hoho grabbers?

One? Yes, I had. I had a team of a Dutch group making a documentary and I put them in the pan basically in the in the in the in the pen in the kitchen, and I forgot to prick them. So what happens is inside the body everything starts to explode and puff it all ended up on the ceiling. So I've had it.

Yeah, You've got to stop now. Thank you so much for Clime Past. You painted a beautiful picture.

There.

You're with the News Talks.

ZB for more from Saturday Morning with Jack Tame. Listen live to News Talks B from nine am Saturday, or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.

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