Cradad Feed

Last week Mr. P and Mr. Wilson went goose hunting. While they didn't get any geese, they did bring home 200 crawdads! I kid you not. So we had an impromptu Wednesday night crawdad* feed.

Here is Mr. P during the first round of cleaning the crawdads.

Here they are up close.

This is during the second cleaning. Cleaning these little critters is no joke. They are very dirty when they come home. First you have to rinse them in the cooler 6-8 times until the water runs clean. Then you take them inside and rinse them in the colander. This was a little tricky. Because we had so many we had to transfer the clean ones to a clean cooler to wait until they were all clean. Plus they move around a lot and kept trying to escape the colander.

I used this recipe from Alton Brown to cook the crawdads. The recipe was easy and good. But the actual process start to finish of cleaning and cooking them was a lot of work, probably a bit much for a Wednesday night. Here is the spread complete with crawdads, sausage, corn, potatoes, hot sauce and beer. You can see my Dad in the corner teaching Chris and Bradly how to pull the meat out.

This is a very full and tired Mr. P with the mountain of crawdads he'd consumed.

*In Oregon we call these crawdads. But they are the same as crayfish and crawfish. They are very plentifully here. Growing up my Grandmother lived on a creek full of them and all the male cousins would go catch them and then terrorize me with them. Then when the terrorizing was over my grandmother would cook them and we would eat them with melted butter. In fact earlier in the day of my first date with Chris, I was down at the creek swimming and my cousin Dell put one on my head. Needless to say I was NOT amused.