You May Be Cajun If…...

..you start an angel food cake with a roux.

...you think a lobster is a crawfish on steroids.

...you take a bite of 5-alarm Texas chili and reach for the Tabasco.

...your children's favorite bedtime story begins "first you make a roux..."

...your description of a gourmet dinner includes the words "deep fried."

...your mama announces each morning, "well, I've got the rice cooking--
what will we have for dinner?"

...you sit down to eat boiled crawfish and your host says "don't eat the dead ones" and you know what he means.

...you don't know the real names of your friends, only their nicknames.

...you gave up Tabasco for lent.

...your dog thinks the bed of your pickup is his kennel.

...any of your dessert recipes call for jalapenos.

...you think the four seasons are: duck, rabbit, deer, squirrel.

The Crawfish Crawl

The countdown has begun.....

46 DAYS until the Crawfish Boil!



Louisana Facts

• Louisiana was named in honor of King Louis XIV.
• Louisiana is the only state in the union that does not have counties. Its political subdivisions are called parishes.
• Metairie is home to the longest bridge over water in the world, the Lake Pontchartrain causeway. The causeway connects Metairie with St. Tammany Parish on the North Shore. The causeway is 24 miles long.
• In Louisiana, biting someone with your natural teeth is considered a simple assault, but biting someone with your false teeth is considered an aggravated assault.
• The Catahoula Leopard Dog, often called the Catahoula Hound, is the official state dog.
• Louisiana has the tallest state capitol building in the United States; the building is 450 feet tall with 34 floors.
• The Magnolia is the state flower.
• The state crustacean is the Crawfish.
• The first opera performed in America was in 1796 in New Orleans.
• Louisiana is America's second largest producer of natural gas. It supplies one-third of the total U.S. production.
• Louisiana is the largest producer of oysters in the United States.
• Louisiana leads the nation in the production of crawfish with approximately 100 million pounds of crawfish per year.

 

You Might Be A Cajun If.....

• You won't eat a lobster because you think it's a crawfish on steroids.
• You take a bite of 5-alarm Texas chili and reach for some Tabasco.
• You're asked in school to name the four seasons and you reply, "Onyons, celery, bell peppers, and garlic."
• You sit down to eat boiled crawfish and someone says, "Don't eat the dead ones" and you know what they mean.
• You refer to Louisiana winters as "gumbo weather"
• You can look at a rice field and can tell how much gravy it'll take for that much rice.

Good Eatin'

Crawfish comin' our way from Louisiana!

According to Cajun Legend.....

Crawfish are descendants of the Maine lobster.

After the Acadians (now called Cajuns) were exiled in the 1700s from Nova Scotia, the lobsters yearned for the Cajuns so much that they set off cross the country to find them.

This journey, over land and sea, was so long and treacherous that the lobsters began to shrink in size. By the time they found the Cajuns in Louisiana, they had shrunk so much that they hardly looked like lobsters anymore.

A great festival was held up their arrival, and this smaller lobster was renamed crawfish.

History of the Crawfish

Nothing else symbolizes the Cajun culture of Louisiana like crawfish. Crawfish have become synonymous with the hardy French pioneers who settled in the area after being forced by British troops to leave their homes in Nova Scotia.

Crawfish (or crayfish) resemble tiny lobsters. They are also known in the south as mudbugs because they live in the mud of freshwater bayous. they are more tender than lobsters and have a unique flavor. Today crawfish are raised commercially and are an important Louisiana industry.

The local Indians are credited with harvesting and consuming crawfish before the Cajuns arrived. They would bait reeds with venison, stick them in the water, then pick up the reeds with the crawfish attached to the bait. By using this method, the Indians would catch bushels of crawfish for their consumption. By the 1930s, nets were substituted, and by the 1950s, the crawfish trap was used.

On July 14, 1983, Louisiana’s governor approved a law designating the crawfish as the state crustacean. Louisiana thus became the first state to adopt an official crustacean. That's how serious Louisiana is about their crawfish.