“You can’t pay a dollar more for the good sausage?”

Introduction

Growing up in the South, I’m a huge fan of fried food, cajun food, and in particular, crawfish!  About 3-4 years ago, I would order live Louisiana crawfish flown in overnight and would cook them myself for my friends in Seattle.  Then one day, the vendor, lawcrawfish.com stopped shipping live crawfish.  I asked them what happened, and they said the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife told them to stop…rather to remind them it is against the law to do so.

I of course then contacted the department to ask why I can’t have my delicious live crawfish sent up to me.  A person responded and basically told me that some idiot teachers would buy live crawfish for their biology class and instead of killing them, they’d release them into the lakes and streams.  Since the LA species of crawfish had no predators, they could kill off the Pacific species of crawfish (which by the way tastes nasty) as well as ruin the ecology of WA state.

I asked them how newly opened crawfish restaurants were able to import live crawfish, and he told me they are not permitted to either.  Sure enough, the next time I went to a crawfish restaurant in town, they confirmed as such and the frozen crawfish tasted terrible.  If you ever see crawfish at a Chinese buffet, don’t even bother trying it.

Freshly Boiled Crawfish

Since I could no longer have live crawfish flown up overnight, I then tried the next best thing – frozen ones shipped overnight.  They are cooked and flash frozen supposedly; however, when you reheated them up, they have this metallic taste to them and they were just no bueno.

Eventually the crawfish farms in LA got smart and tried a new technique – freshly boiled crawfish.  Essentially, they are cooking the crawfish the day of and then sending them up with an ice pack overnight.  Once you get it, you simply reboil for a couple of minutes and are good to go.  These taste 90% as good as the live ones.  The main difference in taste is that they are not as tender as the live ones; however, because my friends and I have eaten the freshly boiled ones so often, we actually prefer it to the live ones.

Here are 2 reasons why – 1. the crawfish is juicier than the live ones.  Think about it – you are essentially cooking the crawfish twice and it has double the amount of time to soak in the cajun juices.  2. They peel a lot easier too due to being cooked twice.  You know how live ones are hard to suck out because the meat sticks to the shell? Well, that doesn’t happen with these freshly boiled ones.  Now you can do the same thing with live ones as well, and maybe I’m just fooling myself into thinking these are better than live ones.

Don’t be frugal all the time

Back to my story – so apparently it’s crawfish season again.  The warmness in the South this winter has caused an early start to crawfish season (thanks global warming.)  I bought 10 lbs of freshly boiled crawfish flown in.  I then went to the grocery store with my coworker to buy some corn and sausage.  When we were in the sausage aisle, I was looking at the sale sausages like I usually do.  My coworker asks me which sausage is best; I tell her the andouille sausage but it costs $1 more than this Polish sausage.  My coworker then laughs and goes, “So you spent $100 to fly in 10 pounds of crawfish, but you won’t spend $1 more for the good sausage?”  

That question hit me like a rock.  She was right.  Why would I skimp on $1 after having spent $100?  It’s like the time my wife used hot dogs in the crawfish boil because she thought we wouldn’t notice.  YES WE DID!   And that’s the point of this post – there are times to be frugal and there are times to splurge.  If you’re flying first class half-way around the world, why stay in a Best Western and not get the full experience?  This is why I don’t like to do AirBnB.  This is why I don’t stay in Best Westerns anymore.  This is also why I spent $20 for inflight WiFi on my 14 hour Sydney to Abu Dhabi flight – so I can check on my fantasy football team.   You can make more money when you get back.

Now I’m not telling you to go on a YOLO $10,000 shopping spree.  I’m just saying there’s a time and a place to splurge and a time to be frugal.  I think as I get older and have more discretionary income, I’ve learned to not be as frugal, especially when I travel or when I eat my crawfish – andouille sausage for life!