Crawdads!

Or crawfish, crayfish, or mudbugs. Call them what you will, these little freshwater crustaceans are mighty tasty. They’re not easy to find hereabouts, but we buy them when we find them.
Crawfish can be found alive on occasion in well-stocked fish stores. We’ve purchased them at Uwajimaya and Mutual Fish. They’re available during the summer. Most of the year we buy them in a frozen brick of shelled meat. Make sure you buy domestic crawfish meat. Once we bought a package from China. It was so vile-smelling that we had to throw the whole recipe out and ate dinner at our go-to Salvadoran restaurant.

A highlight of buying live crawfish is to watch the cats’ reactions. Luka wasn’t sure what to think, but he was interested. Last night we tried to introduce Neli to our future dinner. She couldn’t get out of my arms fast enough when she saw the mass of twitching claws and antennae.

A crawfish tries to make a run for it. Luka’s on the case.

So what to do with crawfish? You can do a traditional Cajun boil. Think of a shrimp or crab boil, with seasonings, potatoes, corn on the cob, and other vegetables in the pot. Because there’s so little meat on crawfish, you’ll need to buy at least 2 pounds of live critters per person. For a tutorial on how to eat whole crawfish, here’s one. We usually make crawfish étouffée, substituting cooked tail meat for shrimp.

Beer is the preferred beverage to accompany crawfish at all steps of the process. A lighter-flavored beer is preferred, although you could try the Dixie Blackened Voodoo ale – if you can find it in your area. So pop open a bottle, twist off some heads, et laissez les bons temps rouler!