Grasshoppers

I've been looking out for grasshoppers (the edible kind) ever since I heard about them being a delicacy when I visited the Kasubi Tombs.  My colleagues advised me that Nakasero market would be the best place to find fried grasshoppers, and even though it's not currently grasshopper season I was in luck today - possibly thanks to the late rains. 

I bought half a containerful and have been snacking on them all afternoon - they are quite nice - crisp fried and savory, like pork scratchings.  The legs and wings are removed before cooking and you just munch the whole body.

Nakasero Market is housed in a roofless red building dated 1927 with only two narrow entrances, a little like the old Covent Garden market. Inside the vendors are organized into different sections; as you enter there are stalls selling goat and pork meat along the first row, with neat lines of pigs' trotters hanging from the rafters.  Next come stalls with large open hessian sacks filled with rice, fresh shelled beans and peas in hues from pale speckled pink to green, lentils, spices - cumin seeds and star anise - and sugar, as well as different kinds of ground and roasted "g-nuts" or peanuts, which are cooked into a sauce to go over rice.

In the center are the fruit and vegetable stalls, with the usual matoke, bananas, tomatoes, and the most enormous avocados I have ever seen (I bought one which must weigh a pound and a half!).  At the left end ladies were cooking up rice and matoke and different sauces for take-out lunches, and at the top were the fishmongers with fresh and dried tilapia, and also chickens that had been freshly killed, drawn, beheaded and plucked - they looked pretty appetising until I noticed that the bloodly carcases were being washed in a tank of not-so-clean water.

While I am not brave enough to try a whole dried tilapia, I did buy some dried whitebait - they caught my eye while I was waiting for change for the tomatoes I bought, and since change was not forthcoming I took it in fishy currency instead.  I'm thinking of frying them with eggs and tomatoes for breakfast.

The grasshoppers may have had the last word - I got a bit of a nasty surprise in the pool later in the day when I found that a huge dead locust had somehow floated unseen into the top of my swimsuit...ugh!