The Crawfish Feast

What can I say? It was one of those evenings! A fun night. Had all the ingredients in one place. Three other couples we love. Laughter,place packed to capacity, loud conversations, shouting over a Cajun band playing in the background. An old family pub atmosphere.

The pub, beer only, the brain child of a ruddy faced, constantly smiling, bearded baseball capped Cajun from Louisiana. Old rusty licenses plates tacked to the wall glaring back inviting patrons to travel back down memory lane or better yet let your imagination run wild. Several hundred dollar bills covered with scribbled messages by happy customers wall papered the bar's walls.

When we pulled up into the parking lot, there was no doubt that we had the right place, we had spotted it at once. At curb side the owner was standing before two ten gallon steaming pots with mounds of grayish-black craw-fish awaiting dipping and a new red coat. Propane fired burners, pots and morsels of honor all sat, tailgate down, on the bed of his canary-yellow restored Camino.

Seated inside we were instructed by our waitress that the craw-fish weren't on the menu, they were special;just on weekends during March. The individual servings came in one or three pound tray orders. The tray included the craw-fish, boiled red potatoes,corn on the cob and sausage all boiled in a hot Cajun sauce. We all ordered the three pounder. No beer for us, water would do nicely, thank you.

The laughter got deafening as we all dug into twisting the heads off then sucking the meat out of the tail. Louisiana-Cajun style of eating them as told by the Cajun in our party. Fingers were dripping in grease, faces smeared with red-hot drippings as the shells, claws and other craw-fish parts overflowed in the "off-fall" buckets on the table.

We went through several rolls of paper towels.

On leaving the hugs went all around. We all felt the deepest appreciation that in all of our pasts this wonderful loving evening would have most likely have ended in just one more horror story.


Jim