Crawfish Etouffee for New Years, New Orleans-Style!

ScreenHunter_251 Dec. 26 19.25Crawfish Etouffee

Ingredients

  • 1 stick butter
  • 2 cups chopped onions
  • 1 cup chopped celery
  • 1/2 cup chopped green bell peppers
  • 1 pound peeled crawfish tails
  • 2 teaspoons minced garlic
  • 2 bay leaves
  • 1 tablespoon flour
  • 1 cup water
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • Pinch of cayenne
  • 2 tablespoons finely chopped parsley
  • 3 tablespoons chopped green onions

Directions

In a large saute pan over medium high heat, melt the butter. After cutting your onions, celery and bell peppers with your Ulu knife, add them to a pan and saute until the vegetables are wilted, aboutIMG_9058 10 to 12 minutes. Add the crawfish, garlic, and bay leaves and reduce the heat to medium. Cook the crawfish for 10 to 12 minutes, stirring occasionally. Dissolve the flour in the water. Add the crawfish mixture. Season with salt and cayenne. Stir until the mixture thickens, about 4 minutes. Stir in the parsley and green onions, and continue cooking for 2 minutes. Serve over steamed rice.

Recipe Courtesy of Emeril Lagasse

 

Now on Twitter and Facebook!

ScreenHunter_231 Dec. 24 15.10Social media helps us spread the word on oysters and more! Join me on Twitter @halgonzalesjr or https://twitter.com/halgonzalesjr/ and/or Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/halgonzalesjr. Follow us and LIKE us! Glad to have you join us!

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Happy Holidays From Our Home to Yours!

 Best Wishes for a Wonderful Holiday Season and a Happy New Year!

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Chefs Love Their Knives!

ScreenHunter_207 Dec. 12 13.27Most chefs treasure their knives! Ulu knives are perfect for slicing, dicing, chopping, and cutting.  The knife is unique because the handle is placed directly over the curved, extremely sharp, steel blade. This gives the user much better control, and greatly increases the force one can use to cut, or chop large, or hard to cut items. It is tough to cut meat and sharp enough to slice a tomato. Read more about Ulu Knives – just click here!

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What Is the Oyster R-Month Rule?

Don’t worry, you can now eat oysters all year long.An employee of the Hollywood Oyster company in Maryland pulls oysters out of the water.

Kit Waskom Pollard, a writer for The Baltimore Sun, gathered information on this topic. One of the more well-known, but less understood, rules about oysters says that they should be eaten only during months that have an “R,” so from May to August, they should be off the menu. This guideline goes back hundreds of years and is rooted in lack of reliable refrigeration and a need to allow oysters to reproduce during the summer months. When oysters reproduce, they become weak and may be susceptible to disease.
                                                                                                                                                                       
Today, thanks to modern refrigeration and the development of new breeds of oysters that do not reproduce in the summer, oysters are fine to eat any time. “The thing we spend most of our time educating on is that with farmed oysters, you can eat them year-round,” says Tal Petty, who harvests the Sweet Baby Jesus oyster at his St. Mary’s County farm, Hollywood Oyster.

“First, they’re not sitting on a boat in the sun for hours on end,” he says. “And two, we grow triploid oysters — hybrids. They don’t have sex in the summer, which means their meat is firm throughout the season.”

The Maryland Department of Natural Resources has a campaign to get diners past the R rule: “New aquaculture technology, strict harvesting standards and modern refrigeration have debunked this myth and made our Chesapeake delicacy enjoyable year-round!”

Source: June 10, 2014|By Kit Waskom Pollard, For The Baltimore Sun