Exotic Foods and Animals

By Anthony:

Okay, this first video is not of an exotic food. But it is hilarious, so I wanted to begin with it. Sara is demonstrating how a dead rooster can still crow!

On to the fun foods. While I was running a couple months ago, I found this huge rat, some type of bush-rat dead on the ground. I heard from friends later that it is edible, but I didn't want to eat this one in case it was poisoned.

But after I shared that picture, my Soroti friends learned that I would be willing to eat one of these. And it was only about a week later that one of my neighbors, my friend Emmanuel, found one! There were other neighbors digging the foundation of a new house and they found one in the ground, and Emmanuel talked to them so that I could purchase it from them for a couple dollars. Don't worry, these are not like sewer rats. It's closer to being like a rabbit, just eating insects and grass and whatever else.

Some of our other missionary friends from Argentina, Federico and Belen, also had been wanting to try eating one of these, so they cooked it up for all of us to eat! They did well. It was tasty.

Traditionally in Teso, it is referred to as ebebele. Most of my Iteso friends just laughed really hard that I had eaten it! Some of the Ugandans we invited to eat with us happily enjoyed it, and others abstained. The ones who abstained said, "we ate that as children back in the old days! But we don't eat that anymore!" As time goes by, culture changes, and people's food preferences change much more rapidly than we might think. 

The meat was very good. It was a dark meat, more gamey than say chicken. But it was very nice. It didn't seem like I was eating a rat. The only hard thing was some really thin bones that I had to pick out.

Don't worry, this little guy might be similar, but we didn't eat him. They get in under our kitchen door once every few months. 

We had a termite colony underground in our yard. Finally we decided to deal with it since they kept causing problems. So Paul dug it up for us and found the queen so that they wouldn't keep coming back. Here is a video showing inside the termite colony.

Here is the termite queen, as long as one of our fingers almost.

Here is a video of the queen.

I decided to catch a bunch of the termites so we could fry them up to eat them. We've eaten them often, but I've only cooked them myself one other time. Although the queen is very edible, I could not handle eating that one! So the chickens got to enjoy her. The termites I got were pretty clean, but I had to clean a bit of the dirt and clay out of the container that got in there while catching them.

The final tasty result. We put cumin and salt and other spices on them. They might look odd, but in your mouth it's like eating chips or popcorn or something like that.

When I visited the home of a friend to pray with his sick mother, they served me bambara groundnuts. They're related to peanuts, but are softer and much bigger. Super good.

And the most exotic food yet, the magnificent Sneepo! Hungry? Why wait? Grab a Sneepo. If I had to describe the taste and compare it to the Snickers bar, the very best way to put it would be that it tasted like you might imagine a sneepo to taste like if sneepo was a taste rather than a sound. Haha.

Not related to our own food, but here is a video of our dogs enjoying bones. Our dogs are both having serious health issues that may not be treatable. But we are trying to at least give them some good nutrition through getting some meat bones once in a while. We just get these directly from the butcher in the market for a few dollars with the raw meat still on them.

This was 2 weeks later, after Caleb gathered up all the bones for himself.

We found this in the garden the other day, some kind of shrew.

Lizards get stuck in Sara's fences all the time. I rescued this one. I really love lizards. We have geckos inside our house too. They poop over everything but otherwise they are really fun.

We have been getting one of these frogs in our house about once a week lately, maybe because of having a lot of rain. They are tiny, like the size of your thumb-nail.