Crawfish

One thing I lament about moving from New Orleans to Oregon is the lower quality of food in Oregon compared to Louisiana. Oregon is not a food centered area, while Louisiana is. People in Oregon don't cook as much and have much less skill in their cooking. You get the idea. Oregon has many blessings, but the food here is not one of them. So when I look for fresh seafood in Portland it's hard to find. there is salmon and, well, that's about it. The rest is mostly frozen and shipped from Asia, not from the Oregon coast where seafood is available but not shipped to Portland. But I did get to eat beautiful crawfish in New Orleans  a couple of weeks ago when I visited at Mardi Gras.

I found one market here in Portland ( a Vietnamese market. The Vietnamese have a passion for food and have better groceries as a result) that occasionally has live blue crabs from the Gulf of Mexico and on rare occasions live crawfish that I believe are of local origin. That's it. The rest of the seafood sold here, apart from salmon, is the low quality frozen mess sold everywhere in grocery stores.  When fresh crawfish is not available I get my crawfish fix buying frozen crawfish tail meat packs at the only place in Portland that has it. Wal mart! Wow! I give a cheer for the 4 or 5 Wal mart outlets here that stock it (no doubt many of the customers are other transplanted Louisianians like me). I use the packs which contain the "crawfish fat' that flavors sauces to make crawfish etouffee, Crawfish Monica, crawfish lasagna, crawfish  fettuccini and a few other dishes that are a good fit with the crawfish tails.

When I have cooked crawfish dishes for the locals here they loved it, but still, Portland is like much of the U.S. in that crawfish are not considered as available dinner option. In New Orleans itself crawfish were also nearly ignored until the 1950's as "trash food" until the Cajuns just to the west of New Orleans migrated to the city and started cooking them in New Orleans. Two rivers near me out side of Portland teem with crawfish, yet few locals ever attempt to fish them. In Louisiana that would never be the case. During spring mating season in the Louisiana swamps crawfish spill out onto the roadway where locals wait to scoop them up.

If you have not have crawfish but are reluctant to try them, consider them as being "little lobsters". They are easy to cook and adaptable to many foods (crawfish bread, for instance, is divine). Those packs of frozen, cooked, peeled tails with fat included are a little bit of gold for me.