Crawfish Boil pt 2

So, here's the boiling pot with a few lemons in it, onions, and some seasoning.
Inside the boiling pot with the crawfish they threw in some other fillers like corn, potatoes, hot dogs, summer sausages, and mushrooms! Just throw it all together!
Here I am at the table which was just a couple trash cans and a big piece of plywood with holes cut into it. THe cooked food gets tossed onto the table and people just "dig in."
Simply twist and pull, then eat/suck the meat out.
They also caught a few crabs in the little water way behind the house which goes out to the ocean. They ended up having some sort of survivor contest where people got immunity, others were eliminated, and then the finalists had to put their hand into a pool of crabs, fish, crawfish (all alive and missing pinchers) and find some keys, then run over to some lawnmowers and ride them to a finish line. I didn't stay to see the whole thing though because it was HOT!!!!!!
Good times in Texas!!!!!

Crawfish Boil?!

Before I get to the crawfish boil details, here's a picture of a catfish I caught recently. I caught 5 of them on Saturday, but only kept this one. It was YUMMY!So, my little group at work got together in Bay City, TX to have a crawfish boil and I RSVP'ed that I'd be there. Karen and I have never been to one, so this was a great opportunity to see what all of the hoo-ha is about. The guy who hosted it is from New Orleans so this was going to be a pretty authentic example of what true crawfish boils are like. He ordered 300 lbs. of crawfish--which, now I understand why (we'll get to that in a minute). Here are SOME of the 300 lbs of crawfish:Once they have the crawfish, they need to clean them out--something I DON'T think they do at the prawn and shrimp shack that Jon sent me to in Hawaii. How do they clean them out? They put them in a vat of concentrated salt water which apparently makes them throw up and poo a lot. That way, there's less of that type of junk in them when you cook/eat them. That doesn't mean it ALL gets out, but most of it does. Here's the vat of salt water/crawfish.ONce they've been "cleaned out," they go into these two holding pots. During each transfer (frm the bags to the salt water vat, from the vat to these holding containers, from these holding containers to the boiler/pot, they find the dead crawfish and throw them away). They only want to have live, fresh crawfish cooked and eaten. So with so many crawfish to go through, how do they know they found all of the dead ones? They don't. It's up to the people eating them to find the last ones that slipped through. Apparently, if they have a curled tail, it means they died in the pot. If the tails are straight, it means they must have died before hand and are not good to be eaten. Anyway--here are the holding pots:Here are the dead ones they found and are throwing away:

Everything has a place . . .

So, when I was growing up, my dad ALWAYS had a place for everything. If, on the rare occasion, there was not enough room to put things, he'd make places for them. One of the things I remember the most are the shoe racks. There was one in the garage and one in the laundry/entry room. Everyone had to put their shoes there--even our friends who came over to visit. Shoes were not allowed to just sit out in the open. So, I too have a few places for shoes. It started with a weakly engineered wire stand from walmart in the garage. I added to my shoe storage capacity by building the front entry way bench. But, that is more for decoraction that it is for every day use. Especially with the baskets in there. You can't just kick your shoes off into the spaces. You have to remove the baskets, put your shoes in, then put the baskets back in place. Evern still--after two locations, we still had shoes lying around--lots of shoes. So, I built one for Karen.
I measured the height of her shoes and noted the optimal height between each shelf for her style of shoes is about 7 inches. You'll note my shoe shelves are not poorly made--the dado cuts are TIGHT (dado cuts are the slits cuts half way into the wood where the shelves SLIDE into),


and then reinforced with three screws on each side. These puppies are not going ANYwhere. I liked her shelves so much I made one for myself, too!
I was on a ROLL! So I decided to take the remaining scrap wood (all of these were made with scrap wood from previous projects or taken from the scraps/trash near the new homes being built nearby) and make a BIG shoe rack in the garage where I could store ALL the remaining shoes AND odd ends such as my roller blades. Again using the dado cuts and reinforced screws.
TIGHT! Dad would be proud, I'm sure.