Guess What I Ate!!!!!!

Yep, I had my first crawdad yesterday at lunch. It looked pretty much like this, except it was bright red and dead. If it had looked like this I don't know if I would have eaten it. I wish I would have taken a picture but I didn't think about it until it was too late.

And where did I get this exotic creature? At the Chinese buffet of course. A coworker and I went to lunch at Four Seasons and they had a whole pot of crawdads. He's had them before and showed me how to eat them. First you snap the tail off, then you peel it and grab the meat out. Simple, right?

Messy is more like it. The first crawdad I tried ended up having a little bitty tail so it was really hard to get any meat out of it. Also, you know how shrimp have the "poop chute"? Crawdads have it to, and it's much bigger. The second crawdad I ate had a huge one, and I pulled it away from the meat only to get it stuck in my fingernails. So not only do I have the greasy juice from the stuff the crawdad was cooked in all over my hands, I also have crawdad intestine in my fingernails. I think I went through about twenty napkins to clean up. I ate a third one, and that was enough.

And the verdict? Eh, it was okay. The meat did taste like shrimp, so that was a plus, but it was way too much work for not a lot of reward. But as Lou pointed out, a real Southerner would have eaten about a dozen in the time that it took me to eat three. So I think those were my first and last crawdads. But at least I tried them! Next time I will stick to the potstickers and seafood delight.

Further evidence that the fortune cookie writers have completely given up. Lou's fortune was "You can't aim a duck to death". WTF?????? What does that mean? My fortune was "Your fortune is on the way". I'm still waiting...........