Cajun Crawfish Pie
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Where Do Crawfish Live?
Did you just ask where do crawfish live? I love this question! As a little boy, my assumption was that our little crayfish (Yankee term) lived EVEYWHERE, including the moon. I thought that since crawdads (another Yankee term) crawl all over my yard, they must crawl all over everyone else's yard too! I guessed that since the mud bugs (Texas term) liked to sneak into my house, they must sneak into Eskimo igloos too. Well, sadly, I was wrong. Well, I was sort of wrong. When I was a little one, you couldn't buy Louisiana crawfish just anywhere. Unless you lived awfully close to Louisiana, or was willing to bribe our Governor, you just wouldn't ever get enough crawfish (Cajun term) to fill a decent sized pot. Things have changed!
About 16 years ago I was in the Air Force. After all of my schooling in Texas and Colorado, my first station was in Alaska. Don't get me wrong, I loved Alaska and all of her cold weather, but I wasn't exactly excited about the food I was going to find there. You see, those of us in Louisiana are so lucky to be surrounded by the best food in the world (yes, Cajun food). I just knew that there wouldn't be a crawfish within 1,000 miles of Alaska. To make an even longer story short, within a few weeks of living up there I found a little Cajun restaurant. This was when the whole Cajun food theme was really starting to spread. To my surprise and delight, the owner of this joint was a recent transplant from Breaux Bridge, Louisiana (the Crawfish Capitol!). Even stranger than that, he told me that I was in luck since he just had a few sacks of live Louisiana crawfish arrive on an air freight. Can you believe it? At that moment in time, crawfish lived in Alaska too!
Getting back on track, no, you usually can't find our little friends living in Alaska, so where do crawfish live? The short answer is that they live around the world in areas in which there is ample water that does not freeze to the bottom in the winter. That means that if your local bodies of water don't freeze to the bottom, you probably have crawfish living right next to you too! They even have crawfish living in China, as we all know from their export of their trash into our markets.
If my favorite little red friends live almost everywhere where it isn't too cold, why are crawfish associated with Louisiana? Good question! The reason that we are so famous for them is that Louisiana is covered in water, we have millions of folks that demand a steady supply of them, and we have gobs of rice farmers that just love to keep us full on crawfish. You add these factors to the fact that Cajuns learned how to live off of anything that grew when they settled the bayous down here, and you end up with a lot of people that have become obsessed with crawfish!
The above picture is a perfect illustration of what crawfish need to live. They have plenty of cover in the grass to hide from predators (the stupid birds). They have tons of food (vegetation, small fish, and insects), and the water doesn't freeze at all in South Louisiana. When you add all of this up, you get one happy home for a crawfish. Even a billion of them!