Welcome to the Kelly's Bayou

Put potatoes, corn, onions, sausage, garlic, lemon wedges and garlic cloves into a pot of boiling water. When veggies are crisp-tender, add the *live* crawfish. When the crawfish are living, they are gray-brown. Drop them into the boiling water, and when they turn red, they are done. (Only a few minutes.)
Drain the water and then dump the pot's contents on a table. Everybody serves themselves from the pile--Louisiana-style.
"It's just like Christmas! I'm so excited!" the children say.
Sarah (my lil' sis) and her new soul mate.
Josh ate so many crawfish I quit counting. (Tate was pretty disgusted by it all. He didn't get a sense of adventure from this whole experience.) And he disected every one of them. Body part by disgusting body part. (I'm convinced that because he was born in Orlando, Florida, he is obsessed with seafood...he once ate live baby octupus at a restaurant; two years ago he ate a live grasshopper.) Fearless Protein Boy.
Tim demonstrating how to get out the meat from his crawfish; Chrishel intently studying his technique.
Sierra took much convincing. (This hesitation could be in part because Tim hid a baby crawfish inside her roll, which resulted in a high- pitched, deafening scream.) Finally she succumbed to a delicious bite.

Here's the scoop:

I wake up a few mornings ago and during breakfast the Mister enthusiastically says, "Honey! Come see what I have in the garage for dinner this weekend!" He proceeds to show me a bucket full of *living* crawfish. ~ insert wincing and vomiting sound effects here.~

His co-worker dug a bunch of them up from Rose Lake near Shelley/Firth, Idaho (a few miles south of I.F.) Joseph brought them home thinking I would share his enthusiasm. Nonetheless, I get online and research how to cook the suckers. Problem is, they've been cooped up in a bucket domestically for 3 days now. (That means they've become aggressive and are fighting each other.) Everytime I go into my garage I can hear them scratching and clawing to get out. Creepy. From this research, I also discover that prior to cooking them, you have to ~purge~ them. (That's fancy talk for putting the living ones in a salt water bath in the kitchen sink until they vomit out their intestines. Repeat until water is no longer brown.) Then they are ready to boil in the kettle.

Thanks, Leech's for joining in the culinary fun! We're glad you enjoyed the cultural experience. I wanted to invite other neighbors, but I knew most of them would be repulsed and think we were crazy. And that would result in Christmas-goodie losses at the end of the year.