Memorial Day 2009

Amy and I were talking the other day and we realized that it’s already been about 5 months since we’ve returned home from Taiwan. Wow. That’s simply amazing to me and it’s hard to believe that the kids are finishing up their last days of school and summer is looming large.

We had talked about going to Granbury or even Houston for the weekend but after being gone so much we decided to hunker down at home and just … be. We’re still trying to find a church home (that’s closer to home) and since we’ve been gone most weekends we just haven’t made much progress in the last 5 months. So that was a big reason to stay home.

So mom came down to spend the weekend with us and when I asked what she wanted to eat, the first thing on her list was crawfish. Twist my arm. So yesterday (Saturday) we sat on the back porch and watched an awesome storm roll in and cook and eat a pot of crawfish – about 17 pounds to be exact. This is prime season right now and they are pretty large:

Since it was a pretty lazy day without much going on I was able to spend the time to purge them well and weed out the dead ones. The result was tremendous:

Besides purging them well I also did a few new things. Instead of putting cloves of garlic in the boil I used about a cup or so of crushed garlic. This really gave everything a stronger, more infused-garlic flavor. In addition, mom told me that dad used to put butter in the boil. This was news to me, but we tried it and it made a pretty noticeable difference in the flavor and some might say it was easier to pull the meat out of the tails. Whatever – it was good.

Today’s menu is simple: ribeye steaks on the cast iron skillet outside with butter. Tomorrow’s menu? A few walks around the block, hopefully.