Almost Mo's Crawfish Étouffée

Spicy rich crawfish étouffée, almost exactly as my Cajun grandmother used to make it. The perfect dish for Sunday Supper or a Mardi Gras party!

Hear that spinning noise? Wait, what? You don’t hear it. It’s so loud on my end and I know what it is. It’s my grandmother, in her grave, spinning. If you’ve read my About Me, you know I am originally from Southern Louisiana, home of crawfish and gumbo and Tabasco pepper sauce. In fact, many family members worked for Tabasco on Avery Island when I was growing up. We never used store-bought sauce because, if you washed and saved and brought your bottles back to my grandmother, she got them filled up with the best of the best, what we called bottom of the barrel. Scooped from the bottom of the barrels used to age the Tabasco, that sauce was the nectar of the gods.

As the relatives who worked on Avery Island grew older and retired, my grandfather, who always had a huge kitchen garden, started growing his own peppers from seeds he had been given by those same relatives. And my grandmother started making and bottling her own sauce from the Tabasco peppers. To this day, you will not find a bottle of store-bought Tabasco sauce in our houses. It’s too full of vinegar with too little body. I prefer to make my own as well, although I can’t get the Tabasco peppers anymore and have to use habaneros. But I digress.

Back to my grandmother and her spinning. Along with the disdain for store-bought Tabasco, I was brought up with a healthy dose of repugnance for any crawfish not caught wild in the Atchafalaya Basin. Those were the years of a short crawfish season just in the Springtime and when it was over, it was over, till the following year. Nowadays, with crawfish farming and crawfish imports from *gasp* China (here the spinning noise increases in volume) we can eat crawfish étouffée year round.

With apologies to my grandmother, we love crawfish étouffée and, in as much as I am causing her post-death exercise by using frozen Chinese crawfish, I try to make up for it by making it just as she would have. Or as close as I can get with the foreign interlopers which don’t have as much of the lovely orange fat as our locally caught specimens.

Ingredients

1/2 cup or 65g flour
1/2 cup or 120ml canola oil
2 medium onions
1 bunch of green onions
1 large green bell pepper or capsicum
1 tablespoon tomato paste
1/2 cup or 115g butter
4 packs frozen crawfish (Each pack is 12 oz. I buy Boudreaux’s, which, despite its name, is indeed from China.)

(If you can't get crawfish, this can also be made with shrimp or prawns. It won't be the same but it will still be delicious.)



Method
Make a roux by mixing the flour and canola oil in a heavy pan. Cook over a medium heat, stirring frequently, until it turns a lovely caramel color. For full step by step instructions, check out this link: How to make roux. 

Meanwhile chop your onions, green onions and bell pepper.

When the roux is browned enough, tip in the vegetables and cook, covered, until the vegetables are very soft – about 10-12 minutes.

Add the tablespoon of tomato paste for color and the butter to replace the missing fat content and cook for a bit longer, perhaps another 10 minutes. (In the old days, the tomato paste and butter were not necessary as the crawfish came with a lot of the natural orange fat which, I have been told, is not allowed in packing any more. This fat gave the étouffée the lovely color without anything else added.)

Add in the crawfish and cook for another 10 minutes, covered. Season to taste with sea salt, freshly ground black pepper and cayenne.

Serve over white rice in the Tabasco gumbo bowls that your grandmother left you. If you are so blessed.

One of my most precious possessions - a set of Tabasco gumbo bowls.

Enjoy!

Quick Bread Breakfast Muffins #MuffinMonday

The easiest, most adaptable, recipe you'll ever need, these quick bread breakfast muffins are a great base for all of your favorite add-ins. Bake up a batch for your family today!

Confession time:  I am a muffin snob.  Have been since 2005 when I discovered this lovely recipe and cut it out of the Flavor section of the Houston Chronicle.  There is no reason whatsoever for a person to ever use a box muffin mix when they have this baby in their baking arsenal.  It is easy and quick (See the title? It does not lie.) and works as well with fruit and nuts as it does with cinnamon sugar or chocolate chips. 

The best part is that you can mix the wet ingredients together and put them in the refrigerator the night before you want to bake these.  And mix the dry ingredients together and leave them at the ready in a cling film covered bowl right there on the kitchen counter.   If you are feeling like an overachiever, you can even get the muffin tin buttered and ready.   When you get up in the morning, preheat your oven and mix your wet and dry, then add your fruit and you have muffin batter ready for the oven in next to no time.  This recipe is also very easily doubled for slumber party crowds for those of you who, like me, willingly accept groups of more than five or six guests and occasionally as many as 10 or 12.   

Sadly, my slumber party hosting days seem to be over so I am making these to take to my elderly father-in-law who hasn’t been well lately and, so, hasn’t been eating very much.  Nothing like fresh baked goods to entice a person to eat, I do believe.  We need to get some more meat on his bones!  I am hoping some of these will do the trick.

Quick Bread Breakfast Muffins

A great basic muffin recipe that is easily adaptable to whatever additions you'd like to make.  Blueberries, raspberries, dried cranberries, chopped strawberries, grated apples, chocolate chips, raisins, nuts, cinnamon sugar, etc.  (Grated apples AND cinnamon sugar?  Divine.  Dried cranberries and white chocolate?  Ditto.)  As you can see, the potential is huge.

Ingredients

2 cups or 250g all purpose flour

¾ cup or 150g sugar

1 tablespoon baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

1 cup or 240ml milk

½ cup or 115g unsalted butter or ½ cup or 120ml canola oil

(I’ve made this many times and either butter or oil makes a delicious muffin.)

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 large eggs

1 generous cup or about 175g fresh blueberries

Alternative additions in place of the blueberries: raspberries, dried cranberries, chopped strawberries, grated apples, chocolate chips, raisins, nuts, cinnamon sugar, etc.  

Method

Preheat oven to 350°F or 180°C.

Generously grease cups and top of 12-cup muffin tin.  Or use the Reynolds Foil Baking Cups, as I sometimes do.  The muffins they make aren’t as prettily shaped as the ones made in a hard muffin tin, but there is little clean up and that is worth more than the aesthetics of the perfect muffin to me.  (So you see, I am the most noble type of snob.  It’s what you are made of that matters to me.  Not how you look.  This also applies to people.)  I give the whole baking tray, including the baking cups, a light spray of Pam. 

Sift flour, sugar, baking powder and salt together. 

First cup of flour.

The baking powder goes in. 

Then the salt.

It's sifting but that's hard to show in a photo. 

Second cup of flour and the sugar.

In another bowl, melt your butter slowly in the microwave.  Then whisk together milk, melted butter, vanilla and eggs. 

Almost forgot the vanilla!

Add all the milk mixture to flour mixture. 

Gently fold just until dry ingredients are moistened.   

Then fold in your blueberries or your alternate ingredients.

Divide your batter relatively evenly between the 12 muffin cups.  Bake 20-25 minutes or until muffins are golden.

Remove from oven and let cool 10-15 minutes before removing muffins from tin.  (If you are using a conventional muffin tin.  The Reynolds foil thingies cool much more quickly.)

This recipe can also be baked as a coffee cake, if you don’t have a muffin tin.  Extend baking time by five to 10 minutes or, once again, until golden.  

Enjoy!

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Cheesy Cauliflower Pancakes

These cheesy cauliflower pancakes are crispy on the outside but cheesy and tender on the inside. A cauliflower recipe to woo the haters over to the lover side. 

I love cauliflower! I was going to say, who doesn’t, but I guess there are a few of you out there. What’s the matter with you? (Please send responses to foodlustpeoplelove(at) gmail(dot)com or leave me a comment. :) The best part of cauliflower is that it is mild, as vegetables go, so it goes well with just about anything. My favorite way to eat it is how my mother taught me way back when: cooked then slathered in mayonnaise. Yes! The mayo melts drippingly into the hot cauliflower adding just the right amount of oil and salt. Just TRY it. 

Another of my cauliflower favorites as a child was cauliflower with cheese sauce. If you can’t get your child to eat a vegetable, batter and deep-fry it or cover it in cheese. Or, be still, my struggling heart, both. Works like a charm. When I was little, my mother didn’t steam vegetables, she boiled the heck out of them, as did my grandmother before her. We didn’t know vegetables could be crisp and crunchy when cooked. Just didn’t happen. But when the cook-till-still-crunchy method came on the food scene, we jumped on it with the rest of the intelligent world. And never looked back.

Cheesy Cauliflower Pancakes

This recipe is healthier version of fried cauliflower with cheese because 1. There is no massively caloric cheese sauce and 2. It is pan-fried with just a little oil. But it is still cheesy and crispy and, trust me, delicious. Even your children will eat this.

Ingredients
1 head cauliflower
2 large eggs
3 1/4 oz or 90g grated cheddar cheese
1 oz or 30g grated Parmesan
1/2 cup breadcrumbs
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper (more or less to taste)
2-3 tablespoons heavy cream (And yes, deep sigh, you could use milk instead. If you must.)
Sea salt
Olive oil

Method
Cut the hard core of our your cauliflower then separate it into florets.

Steam, covered, until fork tender.

Remove the cauliflower and the steamer and dump the water out of the pot.

Return the cauliflower, a little at a time, to the pot or a metal mixing bowl and mash thoroughly with a potato masher. The cauliflower will mash better if it is still hot.

 

Stir in your two cheeses, eggs, breadcrumbs, cayenne and a good sprinkle of sea salt.

 

I was very generous with the cayenne because we like spicy. Temper this to fit your own family.

Add in the cream. You don't want the mixture too wet but it should look like it would hang together. Mix thoroughly and make a test patty after 2 tablespoons and then add more if it is still too dry.

Turn your oven on as low as it will go and put a baking tray in it. This will be to keep the first patties warm as you pan-fry the rest.

Form the cauliflower mixture into small patties and pan-fry the first side in a non-stick skillet or griddle with a light drizzle of olive oil. Cover the pan for a few minutes when the patties are on that first side, so that the egg in the mixture cooks through.

 

When side one is golden, flip carefully to the other side and cook until golden with crunchy edges. You can add another drizzle of oil, if need be, but the melting cheese often adds enough oil to the patty to help it crisp up.

 

Put the first batch of cauliflower pancakes into your baking pan in the oven to keep warm and keep making patties and frying until all are done.

Enjoy!