Thursday, November 20, 2008

Kitchen bugs

I get really grossed out by kitchen bugs. In the past I wasn't able to eat cauliflower for over a year because of an "incident", and then their was the chard from our garden, also deemed inedible. All because of some tiny little pests. I wish I could get over it quicker, but when I eat those contaminated foods, all I can think about are bugs, bugs, bugs. We haven't had any problem since we've been at the condo but then in the course of a week I've been nearly kicked out of my kitchen! First, we had broccoli bugs. I had 3 head of broccoli and only 1 was contaminated which I thought was very strange. I inspected it VERY carefully though so I'm pretty confident that I didn't miss any. The old Sara would have HAD to throw it all out, even the 2 OK bunches of broc., but I tried to be brave and frugal and went ahead and used the broccoli sans bugs. Then, just 2 days later I had plans of making a huge batch of garbanzo beans to freeze and make hummus. The beans had been soaking a couple of hours so I went to have a peek, EW EW EW. There were little black bugs floating all over the top of the pot. I saw some black dots on some of the beans and squeezed a bean to inspect further and realized that is where they were coming from. They were burrowed into the dried beans and were being released due to soaking. I had to throw away the entire pot of beans and there was probably 6 cups of them.:( Since these episodes I've been eating mostly those packs of prewashed spinach because it is all I can handle. I get grossed out when I think about the bug incidents and am afraid to make more beans because I'm worried more bugs will pop out, or even worse, that the black beans had them too and I just couldn't see because they were black. OK, I'm done getting myself all worked up over a bunch of bugs.

5 comments:

Georgia said...

oh I understand the bug in bean thing - when I was living in Uganda all the dried beans had weevils - and that was all I could eat to get my protein - my only other options were meat, eggs and dairy. So I had to diligently sort through every bean and pick out the ones with the weevil holes in them - then my housemate would do the cooking because I didn't want to know if there was anything still in there - oh you reminded me of this - I didn't think it would happen in the western world - :(

Unknown said...

Ewww, the bean bug account is horrible. I'm sorry that happened. Yuck, Yuck.

Laural Out Loud said...

I had no idea beans could have bugs! I would've just assumed that bugs had been attracted to the water, flown in and drowned. I know, not very logical. I did find bugs in our brocolli the other day and nearly had a heart attack- I found them on accident and in all likelihood would've steamed and eaten them. Makes me wonder just how many bugs I've eaten because I haven't been careful enough. Believe me, though, I've been VERY careful ever since.

Jen said...

we had bugs in our garbanzos a few weeks ago...eeeew it totally grossed me out too! now i'm always on the lookout!

Anonymous said...

Oh my god this is making me realize how many bugs I must have eaten because I rarely look that closely at the food I am making. I make hummus weekly, so now I am going to inspect for sure. Once when I was little I saw a bug on the counter when I was eating oatmeal and couldn't eat oatmeal for about a year because all I could see was the potential for hidden bugs.