In the next hour or so, I found four more. I couldn't help but call my neighbor over to look at the ugly beasts. Nor could I help showing them to her teenage son and his friends, who were as fascinated/repulsed by them as I was.

I didn't kill them right away --- not because I didn't want them dead, but because they were so big I had to figure out the best way to get rid of them. So I googled for a little while to figure out what to do next. I don't know what came over me, maybe because I was using chopsticks to try to arrange them next to a tape measure to take a few pics (why didn't I think to put them in a martini glass as a measure of scale?) and it occurred to me they'd be big enough to stir fry... so I googled "tomato hornworm recipes." Imagine my horror when it yielded 40,000+ hits. It was a culinary train wreck. I was hooked. I couldn't unthink it. I couldn't look away.

I didn't think my neighbor would go for it, but putting a dare before teenage boys is easy pickins' (even if they're so picky in real life that they won't eat tomatoes, which one of them is). I knew Steve would be game: before he went to med school, he earned a masters in medical etymology and parasitology, and spent nine months doing research and living with the natives in the Amazon basin in Columbia and Brazil, eating some unusual things in the process, on account of there not being any grocery stores. My curiosity had been piqued. I had to do it. In fifteen minutes (at 10:00 pm on a weeknight) I had a friend, a spouse, and three teenage boys in my kitchen.

The posts on the internet claimed it was a very tomato-ey flavor, not unlike soft shell crab. I will not dispute that description. The boys were an absolute hoot, and although none of them ate more than half of their worms, each tried a good portion. Steve said he wouldn't mind having it again. I hope I never have enough worms to do so. There was something villainously delightful about serving them up on a slice of fried green tomato with a bit of basil on the side. The flavors were well matched, but it was so poetically just, I'm still giggling at the audacity of it.

If you haven't closed this post and run in terror yet, it's possible you might be wired as weirdly as I. If so, I submit for your train wreck viewing pleasure:

Dont they turn into really aamazing moths Luna maybe?

You are my hero.

Your write up is notable and should be sent to a fine cooking show or magazine, it would win awards and be remembered for a long time. I envy your free spirit in life and ability to think out of the box. Kudos.

Actually this looks way more appetising than an eel pizza I once ate.

Tomato hornworms are actually really pretty moths. I remember finding a stranded hornworm caterpiller in one of my greenhouses and I felt sorry for it and carried it out to my veggie garden and let it loose. LOL. Those sorts of things are learning curves. What amazes me is how much they can defoliate. Sort of like photosynthetic pirhana.

My boys would have sat there, going yummy and smacking their lips. They would have tried to out-gross each other. The winner in THAT contest would have been the one that got their father to leave the table. He's not good at Gross.

I know there are places in the world where grasshoppers and fried ants are a delicacy, but I don't think I want to go that route either.

Pat

:)

Surprisingly, my least favorite aspect of the experiment was the corn meal. I much prefer flour for fried things, and would have substituted, had this not been such new territory for me.

Suzy, your questions about wine pairings intrigue me. There are few contexts in which I enjoy sweet wines. I'd have probably served a Vihno Verde. I recently bought an inexpensive, yet satisfying case: Quinta da Aveleda 2010 from Portugal. It's crisp, ever so slightly effervescent, has a hint of lemon to cut through the rounder fruit notes (peach? melon?), and is a perfect hot weather wine. I think an acid note was missing from the preparation.

Agnes, to answer your question, I rinsed them off well and plopped them (still live) into the hot oil. No corn meal. I fried them for a good four minutes and then hit them with a little salt when I took them out. They do leak a little leaf and tomato juice, especially if your oil is hot, so I'd probably fry these babies last if I did it again.

Actually, if I did it again (and I might), I think I'd go a tempura route. I'd do them up with slices of green tomato (the combo is a winner), eggplant, onion, and maybe some squash blossoms, and serve them with a savory dipping sauce. In my mind, these things are begging to be eaten with chopsticks, and the boys were afraid to bite into them and asked for knives. Maybe an eater could concentrate more on the flavor and less on looking at the beastie if it was in a tempura cloud.

I tried to find some again this morning and was unsuccessful... but with a little research, I learned that these things glow like scorpions under black light. I will be out in my garden at nightfall with my black light to eradicate the rest of these critters from my solanaceae. The jury is still out on where I go from there.

(I didn't notice the misspelling, but I was immediately sucked right into your story.)

Thumbs up on tempura the next time. I do tempura about once a month to lure my DH into eating oriental. The old Japanese way is so simple..a one to one mixture of flour/egg/and one cup of icy water. You'd eat a lump of coal fried that way. I have advanced his diet from Katsudon to spicy Chinese by tempura meat. LOL. It was like training a little kid to eat their veggies.

That sounds like one terrific summer wine. I'll have to check it out!

I never noticed the misspelling, either.

1. EW EW EW EW
2. You're my hero, too
3. That really is a good presentation
4. Did they squirm when they went in the hot oil? Were they already dead?
5. Those things are FREAKING HUGE!!

On a more practical note , did you "purge" them before hand ? A bath in milk or salt water empties the intestinal track.

While i totally agree with the choice of corn meal as more authentic, 1/2 flour 1/2 corn starch would be light and crispy or to be hip for the next month PANKO PANKO PANKO!!!!!!!!!!!!

PunkinHead, you're supposed to purge them? Really? Oops! What I did do is keep them all together in a jar for a couple hours (except to throw them briefly at they boys and laugh as they tried to be cool about it, but mostly failed). The worms pretty much cleaned out most of their intestinal tracks in the process, and I did give them a little bit of a scrub in a colander before I threw them in the hot oil. I'd actually considered panko, but had used it all up in the eggplant Parmesan I'd made earlier in the evening.

If I find any more under the black light this evening, it's tempura all the way, baby!

(Maybe I could like up flour, beaten egg, and panko in a lone and get the little buggers to march through them in order and down a ramp into the oil.)

By the way, so you get the menu right, from the diagonal marking, I think you have tobacco hornworms, which also eat tomatoes, rather than actual tomato hornworms that have bufurcating laid over "V" shape side markings.

Ron

Tobacco hornworms (tomato hornworms have black horns) are the larva of big and beautiful sphinx moths, not the distinctive hummingbird moths, though they behave similarly. Attached are some images of the adult.

You were so lucky to find 5 fat caterpillars that were without the usual parasites! ;-)

Serves them right (no pun intended)
Well done (again, no pun intended)

Rhizo, wasn't the sphinx moth what was in "The Silence of the Lambs" ?

Great story.

Seems to me that your worms are a bit thinn-ish.

What I'm wondering is ... how did Jazmyn react?

I've only found one, rather smallish one, in my garden ... so far.

Hadn't thought of treating it as you did.

Dog'll (actually, female canine) eat most anything ... but draws the line at tomato worms (or other kinds, as far as I know). She's one that I'm dogsitting for a friend ... who is less than enthused about getting her back redolent of skunk.

Cats haven't shown any interest, either ... maybe they would, if I fried 'em.

Having lived in the orient for a while, I've eaten some rather exotic stuff, including, I suspect, dog, as I had some rather unusual meat in some soup ...

... and saw an empty dog-hide being carried across the yard, later.

Being rather frugal myself ... maybe I should try some: can't beat the price (and one gets a bonus, in less ravaged tomatoes - but that'd be the same were one to have tromped 'em underfoot; they do make a green, oozy, rather gory mess ... quite a large one, if you nab a big one.

And, yes, they do resist.

ole joyfuelled

I shared your post and picturs with my DH, and he said it gave him goosebumps. He also said if we see a big worm of any kind on our two tomato plants, that's when we'll stop having home-grown tomatoes! (We're not very adventurous.) :>)

I am reminded of a coworker who told of his grandson, age 3, making "worm soup." As 3-year-olds are wont to do, he got caught up in the realism and popped an earthworm into his mouth. As grandpop watched in amazement, he chewed and swallowed. So grandpop says, "Well, Cole, what's an earthworm taste like?" "Tastes like chicken!" says he.

Hmmmm . . . . really?

mwheel - have to agree with your interpretation of the tone of some of their posts. Wonder if they would throw a fit if they were here to watch me spray the cattle and the barn for those pesky flies....hummm Deep fried barn flies served on a bit of sweet feed with extra molasses on the side. LOL

George - get the Everclear out. I just have visions of those hornworms exploding when I take a bite. As Janis says - Lord love a duck!

I'm an organic gardener, and as such, if I'd chosen to use an organic pesticide, which I didn't, I might have used Bt. If the sanctimony of a few over there were really about the method of dispatch I'd chosen, that some people use Bt should instill outrage, (indeed they should busy themselves railing against Bt all over the internet), afterall, Bt causes an insect's digestive tract to rupture, and it digests itself and starves over the course of days. If I were an anthropomorphic idiot, (which I'm not---I'm apparently an insecticidal maniac, there's a difference), I'd imagine that this would be way worse way to die. Perhaps a handpicking and a stern talking to would have been preferable. Positive caterpillar reinforcement would be even better.

But the truth is, the problem wasn't that I killed five caterpillars, so much as I broke a cultural taboo and ate them. One poster, who was outraged (even though she neither read my post nor saw the pics), wondered if I'd had to throw my pan away afterwards. (Really Sylvia? Really?) Since death by oil lasts seconds (identical to death by smooshing or death by wild chicken, and significantly less than death by Bt, and I don't see people freaking out about these) the the explanation I can come up with is that people uncomfortable with the cultural taboo against entomophagy, projected their discomfort oil thing, and latched on for dear life. People from 80% of the world's nations eat insects. But people in developed nations generally consider it taboo, except when they eat red velvet cake, thus the repulsion, which I do get. I think it's healthy to examine taboos from time to time.

I am showing tremendous personal restraint right now.

Your restraint is noticed. Smiles. They probably don't like the parasitic wasps either. Hmmm... wonder if any of them would pick the wasp eggs off and then 'release' the worms to the 'wild'.

Your Bt comparison is a perfect one. And don't forget about the long, drawn-out death from parasitoids YUK!

Slapping them into a vat of hot olive oil would be a reprieve from what Mother Nature dishes out.

Dorie

Lisa

You go girl!