Week of May 14: Crawfish Boil

About 2 years ago, Andrea and I attended the wedding of my friend Zach to his wife Laurie in New Roads, Louisiana, a small Creole town about 2 1/2 hours northwest of New Orleans. It was there where we had our first genuine crawfish boil. Ever since then, we've had the biggest craving for crawfish. After two years of just talking about having a crawfish boil, we finally decided to just do it. We had originally wanted to have a small crawfish boil with just our Cajun friends but as it always does, we ended up inviting a few more friends.

Due to the birth of their first child 10 days before, Zach and Laurie were not able to attend. Laurie is from New Roads, LA and we had wanted her expertise on our first crawfish boil. Fortunately for us, our friends Peter and Chantel did attend. Chantel is Cajun as well and her boyfriend had received some schoolin' in the fine art of crawfish boilin' from Chantel's family last summer.

Early in the week, I place the order for 60 pounds (approx 5.5 pounds per person!!!) of live crawfish from Louisiana Crawfish Company to be flown in via Fed-Ex and delivered on ice by Friday. It arrived promptly on Friday and was transferred and packed into a cooler full of ice for the boil on Saturday.

The crawfish arrived in a Styrofoam box. Inside, the crawfish were divided in two 30 pound mesh bags. Kodi had never seen one of these critters before. Kodi wasn't quite sure what to make of them. Brandon had a fun time chasing Todd around the yard with a live crawfish. Leslie was right, Todd does scream like a little school girl!



Here's what 60 pounds of live crawfish look like. I think this was a 130 quart cooler... big enough to double as a coffin! The first step was to purge the crawfish in water and baking soda. By doing this, the crawfish "spit out" all the swamp gunk from their system.

While we were cooking the crawfish, Andrea made some Pigs in a Blanket. After being chased by Brandon and the crawfish, Todd took comfort in this tasty treat. Here is a manly picture of Todd grabbing the hors d'oeuvre... "Ouuu!"



I had to stop and admire Peter's skills. Chantel's parents would have been proud! The crawfish were cook to perfection. Chantel gave her "just like home" approval as she sampled the first batch.

And with Chantel's approval, we began to pile on the cooked crawfish directly onto the table. And as usual, Brian and Brandon were the first ones ready to eat

Along with the crawfish, we boiled some corn, potatoes and hot links. Soooo good!

Who says that a crawfish boil isn't sophisticated?

There really is no limit of how much fun you can have with these critters!

We discovered that eating 60 pounds of crawfish was a lot of work. Notice that no one is actually talking here. Brian was supervising to make sure everyone ate at least 5 pounds each!!! We managed to suffer through it ;)

There is a trick to properly eating crawfish. Towards the end of the 60 pound meal, we were all experts in peeling the crawfish... well, everyone except Leslie.

Ed and Laura's son, Sean, thought it was a crabgrass boil. Our weed problem could have been solved... too bad he didn't like it.

After we had gotten our fill, we got down to some serious fun. Brandon was the big winner of Acey Duecy. We'll definitely have to do this again real soon.