Another One for the Ages

a few weeks back, well... there happened to be crawfish boil in Red Hook. let me tell ya, bugs big as beer cans...


I got hooked up in the crawfish game down in Atlanta. My friend Jeff would throw great boil parties on an old railroad mail-drop platform. We'd get hammered and eat mud bugs all night and then walk home smelling like a bus tub from Seafood Shanty. It's a bit of a challenge, actually, there's a few processes that need to be followed from start to end for you to pull it off.
First, I had to find the crawfish in NYC. Hard to do. Nobody knew what the hell I was looking for. I found a lot of tail meat, but they need to be alive. Oh yeah, a-live! There isn't a lot of business for them even here in NYC, most of the restaurants serve the tail. The Fish Market in the Bronx couldn't help, either. The simplest way is thru the internet. There are two companies who share advertising and farm space from Maurice , LA called CrawfishStop and The Cajun Grocer. If you want the best product, go right to the source. I got 40 pounds shipped to my door. The crawfish are fished, packed and shipped within hours of being sent to me. Overnited by FedEx in a styrofoam coffin packed in ice bags and with all of the seasoning that you could ever use. When you get the box, make sure you hose them down for a few minutes, let them move around a bit, get a little feisty. Next, is the purging. Not the most pleasant time of the day. You need to salt out all of the evil. Empty bugs in the box, a tub or an oversized cooler. Cover them with a whole can of salt, either table or Kosher salt will do, save the good shit for your risotto or golden beets. It has to be a lot. You're purging its system clean of the pond. Fill the tub with water until they're covered and let them soak for 15-20 min. You can do it as much as you like. but once worked well for me. Drain the tub and hose them down again. Throw away any dead ones. I covered them in cold, wet towels until I was ready...to play with them, of course
...and dogs love 'em, too!
We had a whole case of sweet corn, 20 pounds of red potatoes and 10 pounds of kielbasa. That's a freakin' boil! You have to boil a lake of water with all the seasoning for a few minutes and then add the potatoes and corn and let it roll for 15 min.

Add the crawfish alive to the pot and try not to think about the karmic foot in the ass you'll be getting soon. As the bugs hit the water they make a sound like a faint cry, that says, "mmmmm corn". No,they don't, sorry. Anyway, you have to keep them down, they tend to float. I did this in batches and we were eating all nite. To serve, just dump. Right on newspaper. That shit was so goddamn spicy, the corn actually cleansed my body by burning my organs. Lovely. Scott helped out a lot, he lived in New Orleans and was all too familiar with the mojo of the mud bug. We had a lot of other food, too. I made Cuban tacos and peanut, garlic and scallion shrimp. Bill took hold of the grill and fed everyone shrimp and pork loin whilst me and Scott were busy with the boil. You got to let them cook for about another 20 minutes and then let them soak for and equal amount of time. The more they soak, the more you need an ambulance. We went thru about 35 pounds before we had no feeling left. Matt Rubendall was the relay between us and our friends who were working that night, like Paul Revere racing through the mist and moonlight, gallantly delivering the ruby shelled gems.
WIth the darkness came more beer and of course, s'mores! Everybody behaved themselves, too, which considering the blizzard of marshmallow a few months ago, was a added bonus to the feast.
It was a great nite. It was my wife's birthday a few days before so I wanted to have little soiree in the infancy of the new summer. I sneaked her brother Ben in from Chicago for the weekend, and some friends from Vermont, too. So if she thought she didn't have any plans that weekend, she was wrong.
You can find theses websites easily and can also talk to an individual human being, someone who has done this since the weaning. It can be kinda pricey if you want to go ape shit, but if it's just 10 or so friends, 15 pounds should do it. The next time I do this, I'm gonna do it exactly the same. I'll see you there next time, Carmen.
click on the pics for a better view...
Cheers!