As a Core French teacher, I try to do things that will engage the kids and help keep their interest in class. One year, I was teaching primary kids (which is not something that I have done for a while – grades 7 and 8 are where I have spent most of my career) and wanted to do something different.
The previous winter, my family and I had visited Bug Feast at the Wings of Paradise Butterfly Conservatory. After experiencing it, I gave it some thought and decided it would be so much fun to do a unit on BUGS, en français, and their contribution to our lives and then have a BUGFEAST Café with the kids at school. Rob was not as convinced as I was that it was one of my better teaching moments but supported me, nonetheless.
With the exception of the one mother who tried to start a petition to get me fired, everyone thought it was great! I even had a number of parents come in and join us.
On the menu at the Café were chocolate covered crickets and mealworm brownies.
Now, I wouldn’t say that I am scared of crickets or mealworms but they are also not top on my list of “things” to spend my time with. And, that being said, I am okay with one or two of each but not a bagful!
For those of you who have never made mealworm brownies before, there is a process!
When you go to the pet store to get the mealworms, they come in a bag full of wheat middling which looks a lot like sawdust so you need to get that off of them, or them out of it, before you can bake them and grind them into mealworm flour, which you then bake into brownies. This is not as simple as it sounds.
When I googled How to clean wheat middling off of mealworms, it said to freeze them first.
Why? you ask? Because you get a bag of LIVE mealworms and you want to “stun” them so they are not crawling all over the place. So I put my bag in the freezer and froze them then got most of the middling off of them.
As I was doing this, the oven was preheating BUT, as it turns out, I should have started the preheat process a little sooner! I had my frozen, stunned, clean-ish mealworms spread out on a cookie sheet. I left the kitchen to go get the recipe and when I came back, much like a filling at the dentist, the freezing had started to come out and the worms were no longer confined to the cookie sheet.
My 250 mealworms were in the sink and crawling all over the counter!
As I said before, I don’t mind a couple but 250? And all over my counterspace!
I called for Rob to come and help me wrangle them, at which point he reminded me that he questioned the brilliance of this plan from the beginning and he was not interested in spending an hour picking worms off of the kitchen counter and out of the sink.
Instead, he watched me whimper-gag as I managed to wrestle all of them into their bag, back into the freezer and then safely into the oven for a 90 minute bake before they were crushed into mealworm flour!
Lesson learned? Go to a specialty shop. There has to be somewhere on the planet where pre-made mealworm flour is a thing!
Life with Clark and Coco 