Crawfish

Now Monday morning Pastor Don stops by to see how things are a goin. And bout half way between the distribution center and the kitchen is a huge blue cambro cooler looking thing. Come to find out they had a crawfish bake/boil prior to our arrival and Pastor Don was a hoping we would cook up the rest of the left over crawfish. Ummm, crawfish is bait, right Stanley? Yep says Stanley, they sure cooked up a lot of bait. Jan? Don't look at me she says they don't have any of those in the dry rivers back in Tucson. Pam? Thats a lot of cooked bait. Brandy? They look like little lobsters, maybe they taste the same too. We could try crawfish alfredo. Yeah, that sounds good --- sort of. Now the Lord knows what he's doing cause bout that time JT from the team from Alabama is a lookin around for some drinks and mentions he has his laptop with him and before you can say hop-skip-jump, right in front of us is a receipe for crawfish-eh to fey! (spelling ain't even close) basically a rice dish. Brandy says "I can do that" so for the next 6 hours the 5 of us sit and peel, shuck, and otherwise turn those crawfish into little bites of meat. See a peeled crawfish would fit in a thimble with room for others. Thats about 30 man hours. What we didn't know at the time, and would have gladly spent the money for was in LA peeled crawfish come in little celo bags all ready for cooking. go figure. Now while we were in the peeling process one of the young lads from Alabama stops by and watches for a minute and then promptly tells us we is a throw'n way the best part. Really? So enlighten us young brother. So he reaches in the bowl, pulls out a crawdaddy, snaps it in half and sucks out both ends. Yikes! hey where did the girls go, and Stanley you ain't a lookin so good, now son you can't be serious. So he reaches in and does it again! Fine now I got to go round up all my helpers. HA. I like lots of different foods, pickled pigs feet from my grandma Staniec, Head cheese from the mennonites up around Aberdeen, MS, shoot - even oysters on the half shell when I was stationed in Fort Polk, LA. But I was not man enough to try what that lad was doing. nope. no way no how. And he stood there for a bit grinnin, popping crawdaddies like most of us normal folk eat pop corn.
Now it took some doing and a few promises but I finally gathered up the troops and we started cooking dinner, with said crawfish as the main course. Brandy did a right fine job cause there were no left overs and lots of compliments. The most memorable was another young lad of about 12 from Alabama stopped by to tell Brandy, "My momma's a good cook and been cookin eh to fey all my life, but yours is better". That will bring tears to a womans eyes, and make a daddy proud.

Once we got the routine down and figured out where most everything was I like to think that the rest of the week went well. We were able to make sure no one went away hungry or thirsty. Tried to make a good variety of good foods. Crawfish included. No one got sick, praise God. Never opened so many bottles of water, ever. The girls handled most of the cooking chores, I spent a lot of time boiling, bleaching and cleaning. Stanley got to go help build some sheds ( or was it just the one?), James even let me borrow a chain saw and I got to work that for awhile. Stanley & I got to work together cutting down a big ole branch that was in the way of the new church office building. Lots of good hard work for the Lord, Lots of fun doing it, Lots of rewards, some that continue to this day. Thank you Lord.

Next post: Jans gator.