Crawfish Bread

As soon as March arrives, I start to crave one thing: crawfish. Crawfish season is typically March to June. This is when they're cheap, big, and easily available, and so it's also when you get to have crawfish boils, an integral part of my childhood. There's nothing like running around in the spring sunshine while someone boils up a huge batch of crawfish, red potatoes, corn, and sausages/hot dogs. When it's time to eat, they just dump it all into a big pile on a newspaper-covered picnic table, and everyone digs in. It's messy. It's hot. It's a lot of work, but oh man is it delicious.

Living outside of southern Louisiana makes it difficult to experience anything even close to a crawfish boil. Thankfully, Norfolk, VA holds a Cajun festival every summer, and one of the things they offer there is fresh boiled crawfish. It's WAY more expensive than they would be in New Orleans (like $5-6/lb at the festival rather than $2-3/lb in New Orleans) and doesn't come with all the awesome extras, but it's the closest I've come to the real thing since moving away.

Crawfish Omelet

When I was a kid, we often got together for large, family brunches, lunches, and dinners with my mom's side of the family. Sometimes we ate at my grandparents' house, but often we went out--there are tons of great restaurants in New Orleans, after all.

One of the places we used to go was Elmo's. I remember that there were two older gentlemen who often played music while you ate--one played clarinet, but I can't for the life of me remember what the other one played. Flute? Keyboard? It doesn't matter really... I can specifically remember them playing "Blueberry Hill" while we dined at a nearby table. It seemed like those guys were always there, no matter when we went.

The best part of Elmo's though was the food, of course. From what I can remember, their menu was pretty much only seafood dishes, and about half of that was crawfish. I'm sure all of it was good, but I wouldn't know. The only thing I can ever remember ordering was the crawfish omelet. My mouth waters just thinking about it. Unfortunately, Elmo's is closed now, so there's no getting an omelet no matter how badly I want one. The only solution is to make one myself.