Tarantulas for dinner?

After a long day; visiting the Genocide Museum, Killing Fields, Royal Palace, and National Museum - plus visiting our friends back at the Cenntral Market, we decide to eat dinner across the street from out hotel. We like this "green" restuarant.FRIENDS is a training restuarant run by former street youth and their teachers. With a large vegetarian menu, vegetables washed in bottled water, and white wine from New Zealand, I feel right at home dining by a pool edged with banana. papaya, and coconut trees around me.

As we finish a sumptuous meal of green beans with roasted garlic,garden vegetables sauteed with crispy rice, and chopped cabbages with sweet potato spring rolls, we notice the girl across from us is eating tarantulas! We intorduce ourselves to discover she is from California (typical). She offers us one of her tarantulas as she already ate one of three and does not want another. Judy jumps right in and bites into a leg. Crunch crunch, Judy says it takes like a fried 'anything'. I decline the sampling stating; "I'm vegetarian!" That brings a few laughs from the table near the wall. Before we know it Judy and I have quite an audience (typical?) A young waiter arrives with a live hairy tarantula on a plate. Ah! Scary? Yes!

He describes how he removes the poisonous part first and then how he cooks it something like the following:

Instructions
Things You'll Need:
• Tarantula
• Medium open-flame fire.
• Banana leaves (or other large leaf capable of retaining heat)
• Knife
• Wooden skewer or stick
o 1 Obtain the spider and remove the front mandibles and fangs.
o 2 Place a skewer lengthwise through the spider. Start at the thorax and extend through the body and exiting at the head area.
o 3 Begin scraping off any excessive tarantula hair, then toss them directly on the fire. Cook for approximately 5 minutes on direct flame.
o 4 Remove from the direct flame, wrap several banana leaves around the charred tarantula and place on indirect flame for 5 additional minutes. This will steam the inside of the tarantula, because this is a wild creature capable of carrying numerous parasites.
o 5 Pull the banana leaf wrap from the fire, open carefully and you have a freshly cooked tarantula. Eat the tarantula as you would a lobster or crab by cracking various segments of the exoskeleton (i.e., shell). According to my tour guide, it was a tradition for a first-time consumer of tarantula to use the fangs as toothpicks.

Read more: How to Prepare and Cook a Jungle Tarantula? | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/how_2283412_prepare-cook-jungle-tarantula.html#ixzz1C5yuFQ00