Oh yeah, I ate frog

So as part of our visit to the temple fair Chen Xi and her friend and I went for hotpot. It wasn’t the best restaurant and it was in the basement so it smelled odd the whole time.

I told Chen to order whatever she wanted, because she reads Chinese a lot better than me funnily enough. She said “Do you eat frog?” I said I never had but I would try one.

When the food arrived and the raw frogs were placed on our table I took a picture. After we cooked some and I discovered they had bones so you basically had to chew frogs and try not to bite the bone. I hate stuff still on the bone, I don’t like chicken wings and ribs for that reason. Anyway I ate the meat from the legs. The frogs look really disgusting, you can see their rib cage and everything, I wasn’t sure whether you were suppose to eat more than the legs, so I didn’t. I then got the brilliant idea to take a picture of the frog I ate.

I only ate the one. I know it is cliche but it tasted like chicken. Actually it tasted like hot broth and dipping sauce covered chicken. I preferred beef and lamb, even the vegetables Chen ordered I didn’t dig on. A bunch of weird mushrooms and some taro or yam like thing. I ended up ordering more lamb.

Chen felt bad about ordering all the frogs so her and her friend tried to eat them. So even after I ate my one frog, there were always frogs floating in our soup broth. It got pretty creepy as sometimes a frog foot would rise out of the red broth and it looked just like a little hand. Needless to say once you put frogs in your soup, everything is going to taste a little like frog.

I don’t know how this compares to my deliberate and successful quest to eat Yak Penis Soup. You’ll have to ask Dave.

Update: I eventually returned to China and lived in Shanghai where I ate a lot of Western food especially as I cooked for myself as part of my weight loss strategy. Now I’m back in Canada, unemployed, and editing old blog posts to try and direct people to my best content and remove more of the potentially objectionable content from this website.

This entry was originaly posted on February 6th, 2006, it was last edited on October 13th, 2024 and is filed under: Rambles and tagged: Beijing, China, Expat.