Ruud Kleinpaste: Dinner from the Garden

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

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack Tame podcast
from News Talks. They'd be road climb pass good morning.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
Than very good morning to you, Franciska. Would do you
are angry? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (00:20):
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.

Speaker 4 (00:40):
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?

Speaker 2 (00:53):
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?

Speaker 3 (01:11):
That.

Speaker 2 (01:12):
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

(01:33):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:53):
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

(02:15):
backyards that we can cook up.

Speaker 2 (02:17):
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

(02:40):
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.

Speaker 3 (02:55):
Very well traveled species. How would you cook them?

Speaker 1 (02:59):
How do you cook them?

Speaker 2 (03:00):
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

(03:22):
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

(03:44):
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.

(04:04):
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.

Speaker 3 (04:19):
The protein, I presume good protein.

Speaker 2 (04:22):
Yeah, it is absolutely brilliant protein.

Speaker 3 (04:26):
Have you ever coocked up the Hoho grabbers?

Speaker 2 (04:27):
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.

(04:50):
So I've had it.

Speaker 3 (04:50):
Yeah, You've got to stop now. Thank you so much
for Clime Past. You painted a beautiful picture.

Speaker 1 (04:55):
There.

Speaker 3 (04:55):
You're with the News Talks.

Speaker 1 (04:56):
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.