How to Host a Crawfish Boil
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 at 8:31AM 
One of the major highlights of my trip to Texas in March was the crawfish boil my friends CC and Chad hosted at their house. Now, I'm no expert, but I think I can give you a pretty good breakdown on how to host your own crawfish boil!
Step One - Find a roadside crawfish shack (Hmmm, we may not have much luck with this in Nova Scotia...). We bought 2 sacks of crawfish and 2 plastic containers of homemade seasoning.
(iPhone pics)
(iPhone pics)
Step Two - Dump your sacks of crawfish into a large clean cooler.
Step Three - Sprinkle the wriggling critters with copious amounts of salt. They don't like that. Apparently it helps 'purge' them if you catch my drift.
Step Four - Fill cooler with fresh clean water.
Repeat steps three and four 2 more times. You want to get as much mud and poo out of their little systems as possible!!
Step Five - Fill a HUGE pot - this one is specifically for boils of this sort and is connected to the propane BBQ tank - with water and turn on the heat. Add one container of seasoning to water.
Step Six - While water is heating, drain crawfish in the basket that comes with the huge pot and rinse out the cooler.
Step Seven - Add whole small potaotes, onions, mushrooms and corn to the boiling seasoned water. Once potatoes are cooked through, scoop all vegetables out of water and set aside.
Step Eight - Lower basket of crawfish into boiling water. They're done when they turn the colour of a cooked lobster. While waiting for them to cook, make sauce for dipping - mayonnaise, ketchup and Tabasco. Surprisingly good!
Step Nine - By now you will be very thirsty. Walk to the fridge and grab a Shiner. Open it. Drink it.
Step 10 - Remove basket of cooked crawfish from pot. Dump into clean cooler. Add cooked potatoes, mushrooms, onions and corn as well as second container of seasoning. Mix and then close lid for a few minutes to steam. Open cooler, reach in and scoop out large bowls of goodness.
Step Eleven - Cover tables with newspaper and grab at LEAST one roll of paper towel. Pull the tail off of a crawfish and pull out the teeny tiny little piece of meat. Eat the meat and discard the rest of the body into a pile on the newspaper. Repeat.
It's all for this one little morsel...
Step Twelve - Drink beers and laugh a lot. Before your friends leave, bribe them with another Shiner and get them to help you pick the meat out of the mountain of remaining crawfish.
Step Thirteen - Repeat on an annual basis.
