My daughter has been in China for little more than a month and already she’s made my culinary adventures seem like nap time for the Hardy Boys. She downed a starfish, a silk worm, a cricket, a cicada, some other bug and a scorpion in one street-vendor encounter alone. Apparently the cicada was the only really nasty one. And that might have been a psychological reaction. She also disliked the starfish, suggesting that if we wanted to know what it tastes like we should go to the where the ocean meets the sand and start licking.

Her latest, and to my mind (pun anticipated, if not intended) most adventurous, was cat brain. She ordered it not certain what exactly she was getting. Apparently her grasp of Chinese symbols is good enough to get her into trouble. When the dish arrived she told her friend it looked like a brain. Her friend insisted it couldn’t possibly be. In any case, she ate it and liked it. She later checked the characters. Yup. Cat brain. Yum.

OK, I’m going to regret this if someone actually answers in the positive, but here goes: can cat brain be had in Baltimore? If so, where? Or is cuy the cutest available exotic food in these parts? Extra credit if you can tell me where I can get a decent scorpion within driving distance.

Photo by Michaela Kobyakov courtesy Stock Xchng