Good Morning Kossacks and Welcome to Morning Open Thread (MOT)
We're known as the MOTley Crew and you can find us here every morning at 6:30 a.m. Eastern (and perhaps sometimes earlier!). Feel free to volunteer to take a day - permanently or just once in awhile. With the Auto Publish feature you can set it and forget it. Sometimes the diarist du jour shows up much later: that's the beauty of Open Thread...it carries on without you! Volunteer in the comment threads.
Click on the MOT - Morning Open Thread ♥ if you'd like us to show up in your stream.
Boiled Louisiana Crawfish
Finally, it's Friday. Not that my week has been especially challenging but today is the annual crawfish boil. Employees, their families, associates, professionals we work with all gather this afternoon at our main warehouse. We will be boiling 800 pounds of crawfish along with potatoes, corn, sausage, onion, garlic, etc.
Crawfish have been a food source here since before the Europeans began to settle the area and it has slowly blossomed into a huge industry. According to the Louisiana Crawfish Preservation and Research Board, crawfish farming and harvesting is the largest aquaculture industry in the United States.
Louisiana leads the nation, producing more than 90% of the domestic crop. More than 1,600 farmers produce crawfish in some 111,000 acres of ponds. More than 800 commercial fishermen harvest crawfish from natural wetlands, primarily the Atchafalaya Basin. The combined annual yield ranges from 120 million to 150 million pounds. The total economic impact on the Louisiana economy exceeds $300 million annually, and more than 7,000 people depend directly or indirectly on the crawfish industry.
As kids my friends and I would trap a bucket full of crawfish from the local drainage ditches surrounding the sugarcane fields; today the industry is organized and booming (although you can still see kids doing it on their own). Rice production is huge in Louisiana--and used to be even bigger--and the rice fields are perfect for crawfish production. The rice fields are flooded and mature crawfish are seeded in once the rice is tall enough to shade the water from the heat, which happens around this time of the year.
By August the rice is ready to harvest and the fields are drained. The crawfish have buried themselves deep in the muds, hibernating, not to come up until the ponds are again flooded in late September or early October. The female crawfish come up with the hatchlings and the growing season begins. Harvesting begins around the first of the year and traditionally runs through the Fourth of July, although those dates are like movable feasts, depending on mother nature's whim.
So today work will end around noon and we will unload the tables and chairs, ice the drinks, and fire up the butane burners for a meal that is sustenance for the soul.
A decent step-by-step article and video can be found here at NOLA.com on how to boil crawfish.
Grab your coffee and join us.
What's on your menu today?