Saturday, May 06, 2006

Are those baby lobsters?

I got a big taste of home today at the San Diego LSU Alumni chapter's 18th Annual Crawfish Boil along Silver Strand State Beach, located across the bay from downtown San Diego.

Click on pictures to see them bigger.

It's one of about 60 crawfish boils held by LSU Alumni chapters, but it's by far the largest. Today's event was a sellout, with about 2,500 people each paying $45 to attend.

Not surprisingly, I met a good number of people with Louisiana roots. Sharing our table were natives of Lake Charles, Houma and Chauvine.

About 12,500 pounds of live crawfish (or about 6.5 tons) were trucked in from the Bayou State.

The mud bugs were boiled on-site in a giant cooker mounted on the back of a long trailer.

There was free beer for the first three hours of the boil and entertainment from a Zydeco band. Booths selling LSU stuff, purple and gold Mardi Gras beads and bowls of chicken gumbo gave the event a Cajun festival feel .

The cooked crawfish were boxed into 50-pound portions, and each table of 10 people received a box.

In theory, everyone was supposed to get 5 pounds of crawfish. But we lucked out. Half of our table didn't show, so five of us got to split an entire box of the critters.


2 comments:

Rex Wockner said...

And I still can't move. No, really, I mean it. I'm immobilized. Someone call 911 to airlift me from the living room to the bedroom.

BarefootCajun said...

I see Rex got his fill of mudbugs. I swear that's the only thing that will get him to come back for a visit to Louisiana.