Eat the Bloody Worms!

I recently had a bit of a disaster cooking up some lettuce for the tadpoles. You're supposed to boil the lettuce for 10 to 15 minutes before serving it to tadpoles. I'm not sure if it's to make it more tender for them or to wash away any pesticides that might be on it since tadpoles are very susceptible to toxins, but every site says to boil it, so we boil it. I put the lettuce in and about an hour later Farmer B asked me what had died in a pot on the stove. It actually turns into this weird translucent material that goes right through a sieve if you leave it there that long.

I was feeling guilty about this the other day when I was at PetsMart and I remembered reading that tadpoles like bloodworms. The idea of this didn't appeal to me but I thought I should take a look at the bloodworms to see how bad they were. Turns out they're frozen into little red cubes about the size of a dice. They come in a sheet of foil and you just punch a cube of bloodworms out when you need one, like popping out a cold pill from a foil pack. I thought I could handle that, so I spent about $4 and bought a pack. Then we drove to Chuck E Cheese for a rare treat for the boys…until I remembered that I had a frozen sheet of bloodworms in the car. I couldn't bare the thought of them defrosting in the car so I put them in my purse and spent an hour chasing the boys around Chuck E Cheese with a purse-full of frozen bloody worms. ((shudder))

The boys are definitely intrigued with them. The name "bloodworm" just appeals to kids. I have zero interest in researching bloodworms to find out about them because I know I couldn’t handle it. When we got home, I cut a cube in half and dropped both pieces into opposite ends of the tadpoles' little watery home. Don't forget that we have "tannic" water, which explains the color of the water in the box. It was pretty gross because as the cubes start to defrost in the water, little red worms start to fall away from the cube and then the whole mess of worms falls to the bottom. I have a worm phobia so this was really vile to me. Then the tadpoles started to devour these frosty little things like piranhas on a carcass.
The tadpoles really liked them from the looks of it and two even got into a little fight over one - kind of reminded me of a very gross tadpole version of the spaghetti scene in Lady and the Tramp.

So now a nightly discussion in the house is whether we boil up some lettuce or defrost some bloody worms.

I'm convinced if our garden had grown I would NOT be doing this.