Crawfish boil '07

One of the joys of living in the South (besides our outrageous accent) is eating pound after pound of crawfish when spring rolls around. For lazy Thibadeauxs, this is usually achieved by going to crawfish festivals or dropping by one of the many local cajun restaurants. But in an effort to christen the new house, we decided to do a good old-fashioned boil on the back porch (also doubling as a bribe to get weekend visitors).

To start things off, we took the appropriate first step of going to Chuy's for chips and creamy jalapeno dip. We then dropped by Quality Seafood and picked up a ~20 lb sack of live crawfish and a few boxes of Zatarain's seafood boil seasoning. Final stop was at the grocery store for salt, potatoes, corn cobs, onions, lemons, garlic, and whatever else we wanted to throw in .

Once we get home, the crawfish are put in a salt-water bath to purge them of "mud" (you don't want to know why those quotes are there). At the same time, the chefs begin slicing up everything while the cooker gets a rolling boil of water going. When the boil is ready, everything is dumped in with the seasoning bags and allowed to stew for awhile (note: a brief euphoria can be had by cracking the lid to smell this boiling mixture). Here are a few pics of the tormented crawfish and the chefs at work:


Much like the rest of the country, our beagles are wondering what the heck we are up to:


After the goodies have boiled for a little while, the crawfish are ready to take their turn. Here they are going in, coming out, and getting seasoned:


At this point we got completely swarmed by flies (they apparently have good taste, despite the whole fecal fetish). We tried a few tricks to get rid of them, including the hanging water bag, with minimal success. After a couple hours we had demolished most of the crawfish, diverting some portion of the flies to our trash box. To wrap things up, we peeled and saved a couple pounds of leftovers and had them later that night in poboys and etouffee (with sides of hush puppies and fried garlic).