Festival season has begun in Memphis! Our first event of the year? The Overton Square Crawfish Festival.
Saturday was gorgeous outside with high temperatures pushing 80. (This is a nice thing about the South - we have like 6 months here that would qualify as summer compared to Seattle.) Overton Square is a pretty hip area of town where we've hung out a few times before. The streets were hopping this weekend with crawfish lovers, vendors, and bands.
In true Memphis festival tradition, the attendees seemed to really enjoy freely drinking in public. (They don't have beer gardens here - you can just walk around sipping your beverage of choice.)
So in the interest of full disclosure, neither of us had ever eaten crawfish (or crayfish or crawdads) before this weekend. They are more of a Louisiana delicacy, but that didn't seem to stop everyone from chowing down. We decided to be brave and buy ourselves a 3 pound batch to try. I had to ask the internet how to eat them. It's a lot of work! But actually, they're pretty tasty.
D.F. reminisced about his childhood days of crawdad hunting in the ponds/sewers of South Dakota. It was a little weird for him to eat the critters he used to catch!
I used to babysit 3 boys who had a creek in their backyard. We would go crawdad huntin' and bring them back to the house, heat up a pan of water and throw them in, pull the "poop line" ( yank on the tail and pull out the intestines), season and eat. They thought it was great fun and it was something that kept the VERY active boys occupied. Thankfully no one drowned in the creek. All this for 50 cents and hour. What a bargain they got for childcare! I earned every penny taking care of them.
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