Shreveport/Bossier Crazy For Crawfish
I'm a native Texan who spent most of his youth in Terrell, just about three hours away on I-20. As a radio veteran, I've lived in 5 states over the years, and my wife and I are in the process of moving to the Shreveport/Bossier area after a decade in Wichita, Kansas. In each place we've lived, there's been some type of regional food that the locals are crazy about. (Except for Kansas where everything is meat and potatoes.) In Austin, Texas, it's bar-b-que; in Mobile, Alabama, it's steamed seafood and moon pies; in Minneapolis, Minnesota, it's "hot dish" which is basically just a casserole. The thing I learned on my very first day in Shreveport/Bossier is that everybody's crazy about crawfish. Just a couple of weeks ago, Chef Peanut from BeauxJax catering treated us to a crawfish boil right here in the station's parking lot. It was hot, spicy, and delicious.
The crawfish phenomenon is not really a new thing to me. My mother is from Silsbee which is in deep East Texas, just north of Beaumont. When I was a kid she used to tell me about how much she loved crawfish, especially crawfish etouffee. My brother-in-law lives in Vidor, Texas, and he's been trying to get me to come to his crawfish boil every year for as far back as I can remember. (We've usually lived to far away to attend, so I think this year we'll make the effort to go.) I had my first taste of mudbugs a couple of years ago, and my second experience with them was when Chef Peanut came around.
So, I gotta tell ya--and I know it's blasphemy--I think crawfish are a lotta work for a little bit of food. And I felt the same way about steamed seafood in Alabama. You work up a sweat to break into the darn things, just to be rewarded with a tiny morsel of food. But I'm not giving up, I'm going to eat crawfish every time somebody offers me some, and maybe someday the light bulb will go on and I'll be a true believer.