You eat the frog’s what?!

I hate frogs. I think frogs are disgusting. I know that I do and eat a lot of things deemed disgusting by other people. But I stop myself at frogs. I can’t stand frogs — whether they are alive and croaking in front of me, or stone-cold dead and served with ginger.

As a kid, I spent a lot of time in Sri Gading with my grandparents. By 9 p.m. or so, the kitchen lights would be switched off, everyone huddled in the living room to watch the 9 p.m. Chinese drama on Channel 8 (when it was still SBC). One night I had to dash off to the kitchen real quick. Then I stepped on something round, cold and slimy. Then I ran all the way back to the living room. To clearly remember these details and feelings of the heart-stopping moment when I stepped on the damn frog shows you just how bloody traumatised I was from the whole affair.

A few years later, I was at a restaurant with my family. My mom had ordered “tian ji”, literal translation is ‘field chicken’. I refused to eat it because it was unfamiliar food to me. My mom then cajoled me into eating one, telling me that it tastes just like chicken. Five minutes into eating one, I overheard someone saying that it was frogs’ legs. I felt sick to my stomach and refused to eat another bite.

About four years ago at the SS2 night market, I passed by a stall with a metal cage filled with live frogs. The lady stall owner took one out and proceeded to skin the frog alive. It was one of the most horrific things I’ve ever seen and I only saw about 10 seconds of it.

Last night, Reuben asked me what was bird’s nest. So I gave him the Wikipedia link. Then I remembered something that my mom used to prepare for us when we were kids. She called it ‘xue ge’; in Cantonese it’s known as ‘shuet kap’. She’d spend hours picking at the fluffy, jelly-ish substance (to clean it), then double boil it as a dessert (tong sui) for me. I didn’t know what it was but I hated it because I thought the texture was disgusting. I remember asking her what was it, and she offhandedly told me that it was ‘something from the sea’. At first it was ‘something from the sea that’s like seaweed or something’, then as I grew older, it became ‘something from the sea that’s like animal or something’.

Well, 10 days before my 27th birthday, I finally discovered the truth.

Do you want me to spell it out for you?

I think you can read these links instead: Link One and Link Two.

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Comments

  1. ROTFLMAO!!!

  2. Hahahah pwned by Hasma!

  3. A sexist food if you ask me!!! Why don’t they eat the male frogs falopian tubes????? ๐Ÿ˜€

  4. doc: why you laugh ๐Ÿ™

    ST: ๐Ÿ™ ๐Ÿ™ ๐Ÿ™

    dabs: you are welcome to whatever tubes. have it all, i don’t want to touch them ever

  5. That is disgusting until you know about yet another “exotic food” : placenta.

  6. hahah.. My mum used to tell me that i can swim like a fish if i eat them. It didnt took me very long to discover the truth though. haha. Btw, ‘tian chi’ is good food! haha

  7. woohoo, 1 more bowl please!

  8. moo_t: that’s some scientology thing??

    iris: yuck yuck heh so are you still eating the hasma?

    ky: have all of mine

  9. tot chinese have lots of tolerance toward so call delicacy food..

  10. Suanie – Yoko Ono ate her placenta after giving birth. She fried it up. Also, I don’t want to eat it either. I’m a vegie, remember! ๐Ÿ™‚ I just thought it was sexist to only eat the tubes of one sex! ๐Ÿ™‚

  11. Giant Sotong says

    I’ve had to pluck the raw hasma of debris and hair after it’s been soaked in water. The fishy smell stayed in my fingers for hours. But the final product’s like bird’s nest. Only with more… character.

    Dabs… do male frogs even have Fallopian tubes? I know the wildlife in Oz is unique, but… .

  12. What’s wrong with Hasma? It’s pleasant!!! Well not so pleasant if you’ve seen how they’re sold; one dried frog after another, but it’s pretty good to eat! Tian Ji, on the other hand, requires some mental preparation on my part, even when I know it really tastes like chicken.

  13. I knew I shouldn’t have read it.. Now what do I do when I drink my tong sui and remember this.. aghh.. dizzy

  14. Frogs are ok, as long as they’re cooked.

    You think that’s bad eh? Try this one…

  15. If I absolutely have to eat Placenta, I’ll eat it raw right there in the delivery room after the birth of my child. Might as well make a spectacle of it. ๐Ÿ™‚

  16. hehe…. i ate frog meat when i was a kid. as a kid, we (me and my bro) were so skinny enough to worry my mom to sick. she’d buy frog meat from the market and make frog soup for us to drink. I was 2 and my bro was 4. actually nothing wrong being skinny, we were so active we can tear the house down. LOL

  17. mum told me it was frog’s saliva gland. ๐Ÿ™

    both also bad lah.

    but if you just gulp the whole thing down it’s not so disgusting mar.. and with the rock sugar and it’s palatable. hehe

  18. i just realised that i’ve been living a lie for 31 years!! How could mum do that to me???????????????

  19. I love frogs!! At least, when they are alive. I’m not sure what the point of eating them is, but them I’m not chinese – or french! Hasma… all I can say is: why???????????

  20. By the way, I can feel for you, I too have foods I hated to eat, and avoid like the plague to this day. I won’t say what, because everyone laughs at me when I tell them.

  21. Hasma! OMG! I want to try that. I wonder what kind of precision surgery can actually extract the fallopian tubes of a frog intact. China has great potential to churn out a new generation of gynecologists. ๐Ÿ˜‰

  22. Like FA, I was always told that it was the frog’s saliva. But it’s all good. Still edible.

    Hehe..and I skinned frogs before. But of course killed them first la. Not so evil.

  23. ……………….

    i don’t feel like eating it anymore.

    but then again, we’re fine with eating eggs, and those come out of animals’ reproductive glands as well, so what should we make of this?

    i should just turn vegetarian.

  24. Snake? Crickets? Monkey Brains??

  25. I’d eat snake *meat*, not any other part of it. You can keep your crickets and monkey brains.

  26. eh i’ve always thought it’s frogs fat! hmmm

  27. theidiotdriver: not this chinsee ๐Ÿ˜‰

    dabs: men have tubes too?

    GS: “I know the wildlife in Oz is unique, butรขโ‚ฌยฆ” = LMAO

    leongsoon: hah! i can’t get past the psychological barrier

    valarie: heahehaheae sorry ๐Ÿ˜›

    SF: that video is disturbing…

    thatjames: back to the stone age eh ๐Ÿ˜‰

    janel: i’ve never come across frog soup before. porridge and as a dish on its own, got lah. i wonder why frogs can make you less skinny? the chinese mentality is like, you want to swim faster/better, eat fish. etc

    FA: hehhehe are you going to eat it after knowing the truth?

    LT: sniff sobs

    doomlord: what kind of food you don’t eat?

    HB: eh it’s a typical chinese dessert. can go to tong sui shops and order it

    vincent: a lot of people thought it’s the saliva too. i.e. my high school friends

    chen: eggs have shells. it’s not the same thing as hasma

    suertes: no thanks!

    doomlord: i won’t even eat the snake meat. i have a natural fear and disgust for cold-blooded animals – reptiles and amphibians

    kim: you’ll still eat it what ๐Ÿ˜›

  28. Suanie – We’re all tubes! ๐Ÿ™‚ That’s all humans are, a whole lotta tubes! ๐Ÿ™‚

  29. men don’t have fallopian tubes ๐Ÿ˜›

  30. dabs and reuben sitting in a tree…

  31. I don’t eat: peas, most beans, sausages, raw egg, a lot of stuff chinese people would eat… ๐Ÿ˜‰

  32. that bit about skinning frogs alive made me shudder….. hasma… okay, technically it’s the fatty tissue AROUND the fallopian tubes and not the fallopian tubes as some claim. Still gross but it’s NOT fallopian tubes, so that’s good.

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