I loves me some crawdad etouffee. The red or the white, it don’t matter. Jus’ pass me another bowl.
You know why Lousiana cuisine is so tasty? It *has *to be. When you’re living among the biggest concentration of truly UGLY wildlife known to man, the cook had better have more than two or three tricks up his sleeve to make it palatable. How else would you convince an otherwise sane person to chow down on crawdads, alligator snapping turtles, and other denizens of the slimy bayou muck?
That’s funny.
Yesterday I was at work (at a large electronics store) and was outside behind the stereo installation place chain smoking on my break. It had been raining. I saw this large scary thing in the corner of my eye. Looked like a cross between a crab and a roach or something.
I called the stereo guy outside to figure out what it was.
Crawdad.
And one guy picked it up. Ew. Those things are hideous. And I thought it was weird being in our parking lot. But luckily I did not see another one.
Man, I miss those things.
We used to have them on the farm, down around the creek (or “crick”…hey, we grew up on a FARM!), but decades of non-organic farming techniques (read: chemical pesticides and herbicides) have killed pretty much every living thing in the ecosystem other than the designated crop and a lot of weeds.
I never ate one, but I remember my older siblings catching them and keeping them for pets when I was very young. By the time I was old enough to go find and collect some, they had all vanished from the property (as had the salamanders, clams, fish, frogs, snails, etc.).
My husband started drooling when I told him about this thread. His mother was Cajun, and he is very, very fond of anything that has a shell. We’ve found a Chinese/Mongolian BBQ place that we all enjoy. It has crab, two kinds of oysters, at least two kinds of shrimp, and baked salmon just about every day. Plus the BBQ section has shrimp as well. He thinks that restaurant is a little bit of heaven.
If we lived in Austin, he’d be right there with a huge collecting basket, catching dinner.
Well, at least in Texas you get the big ones. After heavy rains In southern California, , all we get are these dinky lawn shrimp.
Why’re you whacking off the tails? Boil 'em whole, with some spices in the water. The tail’s the meatiest part, but a true Bayou type sucks out the innards, too. And don’t miss the claws! Lots of good meat in the claws.
I don’t know how big these critters were, but I’d have to guess at least 4 inches long from head to tail. Big enough for me to sit in my car and watch them scuttling about from, say, at least twenty feet away. And to think I had my camera with me, and didn’t even think to snap any pictures.
I mentioned the crawdads to a lady I work with, who told me that she used to catch them when she was a young girl here in Austin (not so terribly long ago), but over the years they shrank away in both size and numbers. Now, granted, I live in an area that wasn’t even close to the Austin city limits when she was growing up, but still. Recovery is recovery. Of course, she couldn’t argue against the plausability of my PETA-at-work theory.
I had a song running through my head all day yesterday. I song I haven’t even heard since, oh, 1981.
