My old friend and political combatant Fernie “The Attorney” Chacon called me last week with an invitation to join him at Mercado Mayapan for a plate of chapulines.
The Mercado, a little spot of Mexico at 2101 Myrtle Ave., has been offering a menu of traditional dishes from different Mexican states each month, and July 1 was the first day for Oaxaca.
I have done a lot of things in my life, but eating grasshopper isn't one of them, though I’ve always wanted to try one.
Oh, I think I remember swallowing one once when I was a kid in San Antonio, riding my bike with my mouth open. But I wasn’t given a choice. It was there in front of my face, and then it was gone.
Considering Fernie’s offer, I knew people around the world have been eating grasshoppers for ages, and I never once heard about anyone getting sick or dying.
Fernie sensed my hesitation and turned the invitation into a manly challenge, which is so typical of Fernie.
I was getting hungry. It sounded like fun, and I didn’t want to eat another bean and cheese burrito at my desk where I usually have lunch.
Coming down the freeway, I decided to take Cotton and exited at Dallas to catch the bridge and found myself behind a very slow Japanese car with a disabled veteran license plate. I poked along behind the man whose head barely rose above the seat as we went under the overpass, resisting the temptation to pull around him, which another car did.
As we approached the stop sign, I remembered covering a nasty traffic accident there for the El Paso Times 25 years ago or so. A car had rolled through the stop sign at the frontage road and was struck broadside by a westbound truck, sending the car into a little house on the corner.
A crowd of neighbors watched as the police, Fire Department and an ambulance were arriving. The resident of the damaged home told me that accidents happen there all the time because there was no stop sign for westbound traffic on the Gateway. He showed me the gouges and gashes in the paint and stucco where cars had crashed into his house before and said the he and his neighbors had been asking the city for a stop sign there for ages. It made for a good story that day.
The city or the state has yet to put up a stop sign there, and I saw the old man in the Japanese care in front of me wasn’t slowing down. I noticed there were cars coming down the narrow cross street and gritted my teeth. He drove straight past the stop sign without touching his brakes and a car smashed into his passenger door, turning the old guy’s little car around 90 degrees before it rolled into the curb facing east.
I stopped and got out to check on the old guy, who was fiddling with his cell phone. I wondered if he was sending a text message, but didn’t ask.
“He ran the red light,” the man said.
I told him the only red thing around was the stop sign he ran and suggested he should quit driving and start taking the bus. I gave the other driver my card and took a picture of the scene before heading on to my date with the chapulines.
Don’t let this be an omen, I prayed.
Sorry for that diversion, poor readers, but it is part of the story and not without purpose. The city or the state really does need to look into another stop sign at that intersection. But I’d bet the auto body shops in the neighborhood wouldn’t really like that. Who knows, maybe they’ve been paying off officials to ignore it since the freeway went in.
At the Mercado, we ordered liquados and made our way to the food court where the ladies behind the counter were surprised that we ordered chapulines plates. Marta Cano said we were the first customers to ask for the grasshoppers from Oaxaca.
Both Fernie and I were expecting a plate of fried, whole chapulines, with their heads, legs and wings crisped up that we’d eat with a little salt or dip in salsa.
Instead, we got three tacos each that held about three big tablespoons of little brown bits, accompanied by tomato slices, limes, a helping of guacamole and several small plastic cups with different salsas.
I took a pinch of grasshopper and dropped it on my tongue. The chile, garlic and other seasonings made for an strange, spicy taste that wasn’t bad at all … for bug.
We settled at a table with our tacos de chapulin, tested the grasshoppers some more and looked for recognizable parts, which we could not find. We experimented with the guacamole and seasonings to see which were most palatable with the little guys from Mexico.
Fernie and I talked about politics and public corruption, avoiding any mention of the lawyers and politicians about whom we seriously disagree. Politics is politics, but friends are friends, after all. Fernie has been educating me for years on what’s what in El Paso, and I refuse to let a few insults and aspersions on the radio come between us.
Of course, we talked about the grasshoppers on our plates. What else? I thought about the chapulines of Oaxaca and how badly many of them probably longed to migrate al norte. But winding up in American tacos could not have been what these guys hoped for. There are so many disappointments in life.
Rebecca Sosa Chacon, Fernie’s long suffering wife, who is the operations manager at the Mercado, brought us one of the plastic containers of Chapulines Oaxaquetenos that told us it was all protein, fiber and spices.
She questioned how many people would order chapulines at $7.50 a plate, but she noted that they are, after all, a delicacy, like caviar. Then, she said she’d better put the chapulines in the safe with the money.
Protein and fiber, I said, sounds like a perfect Atkins diet and wondered aloud about why, with all the hordes of grasshoppers buzzing around the world, people did not harvest them.
Fernie suggested that the U.N. should scoop them up from locust plagued locales in huge blankets and deliver them by the millions to places plagued by drought and famine as an enormous, cheap, never-ending source of food.
That’s brilliant, I said, and told Fernie to pose for a picture con sus chapulines del sur.
So, before the month is out, drop by Mercado Mayapan and try a spicy order of tacos de chapulin or some other lunch recipe from the state of Oaxaca while it’s still available.
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To reach David Crowder, write to dcrowder@epmediagroup.com or call (915) 351-0605, ext. 30, or 630-6622.
