The boil order (and street flooding) decade

We'd say last weekend was pretty wild but we're used to it.  A lot of rain in the space of a few hours, the streets all flood. Water gets in houses and businesses and cars. Would you believe this whole sack of crawfish just came floating by our front door?



Well, okay, we made that part up.  But we would believe it.  Just another mid spring Sunday in the City That Floods.

For all her efforts to rebrand New Orleans as the “City of Yes,” Mayor LaToya Cantrell may have actually stumbled on a more fitting slogan for the area less than two weeks into her term.

“We are a city that floods,” the recently inaugurated mayor said after a May 18 storm drenched the region last year.

Nailed it. Hashtag CityThatFloods.

"When we take on too much water at any given time, we will have street flooding," the mayor tweeted out then. "We have to be prepared."

For residents, that means hustling to get vehicles to higher ground, lashing trash bins and lawn furniture to something solid and hoping that the turbines, pumps and their operators are all fully engaged at the Sewerage & Water Board.

Yeah, I remember that one. It's been an eventful year in office for Mayor Cantrell. The, "hey, it's a city that floods" bit seemed like so much unintentional comedy at the time. It got less funny, though, as the year went on and the mayor's pattern of blaming residents for the bad things that happened to them came more and more into evidence.  Sewerage and Water Board's billing software is an unholy mess but the real problem is you guys are deadbeats.  We fiddled with the traffic cameras without telling anybody but the real problem is y'all have a "laissez-faire approach" to life here in the Big Easy. There's been a brief spike in violent crime but the real problem is, y'all are bad parents.

Last Sunday morning a pumping station lost power during a heavy thunderstorm. What were the real reasons for that? Well let's go through the usual theories to see if we can come up with something.  We'd say it was because some employees fell asleep but that's who we blamed it on last time.  We've also already played the runaway truck card.

We could say it was some sort of wayward animal. We've already used up squirrel, also raccoons, more than once, I think. There was one very famous cat. There's no shortage of mischievous critters crawling about New Orleans, but even so, we're running out of suspects.

It seems we've landed on lightning strike as the main culprit for the Mother's Day flood. But it's odd that it would strike five times. At the end of the day the real problem is most likely to be our negative attitude.

But there's been little to disabuse us of our fatalism in recent years. SWB's leadership aren't even trying. They even brought a graphic to this City Council presentation listing the 28 boil orders we've experienced since 2010.  That can be a real downer.  But the punchline is they can't even get that right.  McBride actually took the time to fact check the "28 boil orders."  It turns out some of SWB's tally include some pressure drop incidents during 2011 that never resulted in boil orders. But their count also omits three actual boil orders while getting some dates and details wrong on some of the others.  In the end McBride still counts 27 total boil orders.  The 2010s are indisputably the Boil Order Decade.  What does it say that the agency responsible for issuing those boil orders can't even count them?  Is there a similar count of major street flooding events since the August 2017 flood?  Mother's Day was at least the third since then that compares.

Maybe we can answer that later. But for now what's really important is that we did, in fact, have all those crawfish last weekend. And maybe they didn't quite float up to the door with the flood. But we went ahead with the boil order anyway so as not to take any chances.



As it turned out, this was more than we had enough people to handle.  Which is how we ended up with enough left over to make a crawfish bisque.



This is a rare thing for a couple of reasons. One reason is there usually isn't enough leftover to work with. Also the process takes a little time and there usually isn't enough of that either. This is normally something I talk about wanting to do throughout crawfish season but never get around to.  It's not very difficult. And, beside the crawfish and the time, it doesn't take much of anything special.  Here's the method.

First, peel your crawfish.

As you do this, obviously, you'll reserve your tail meat and whatever fat comes off with it in a container. It's hard to say how much you'll need. You're starting with some undetermined quantity of leftover boiled crawfish in the first place. I think we ended up with maybe 5 or 6 pounds altogether. I didn't even use it all. There's still some in my freezer now.

As you are peeling, you will want to reserve some of the claw shells and some of the tail shells in one pile. Use these to make a stock. Just throw them in a pot with some water and bring it to a boil. You can add onion and celery if you want.  Let it simmer a while and then strain.

Meanwhile the heads go in their own pile. Use a butter knife (or maybe a thumb you don't mind scratching up pretty good) to dig out all the guts so you are left with a pile of hollow carapaces.  Set that aside for a minute.

Next, make the stuffing.

Chop yourself up some onion, celery, bell pepper, garlic, maybe some parsley, as finely as possible. Saute in butter. Grab about... oh I dunno... maybe half a pound to three quarters of a pound of the tail meat and mince that up real fine as well. Add the meat to the vegetables in the pan.  You can season this with a little Tony's or just salt and pepper or crab boil or whatever. But if your crawfish boil was well seasoned already you probably won't need much. As that cooks, add about a cup of bread crumbs to thicken it up.  Next, beat two eggs, temper them with a bit of the stock, and add this to the pan as well. Stir until you get the consistency of, well, stuffing.

Stuff the heads

Each crawfish head should take a spoonful of stuffing.  How many do you need? I don't know just keep going until you run out of either heads or stuffing. I counted 34 by the time these went into the oven.



They go in a 350 degree oven for 15 or 20 minutes. However long it takes to brown a little bit.



Meanwhile you still have to make the bisque.

For that you're gonna need to make a roux. You guys know how to do that. It doesn't have to be very dark.  Just a medium blonde is fine. That gets more onion, celery, bell pepper, and garlic. I also put in a can of tomato paste. It was pretty thick.

Once the vegetables cook down a bit you can start adding your stock. You're going to want a mildly thick soup. The seasoning isn't complicated. Salt, pepper, red pepper, Tony's, crab boil, whatever you have and however much you like. I think I added some thyme.

Add, roughly, a pound or a pound and a half of the crawfish tail meat you peeled earlier and bring to a simmer.  I also added some green onion and squeezed in a lemon.  After simmering for a while, go ahead and add the stuffed heads to the pot. It looks like this.



Some people want you to take the "faces" off of the crawfish heads before you stuff them but that's no fun as far as I'm concerned. Look at those guys floating around in there. It's adorable. Serve over rice, of course.



If you took the time to stuff a lot of heads this is where that work is rewarded. Everybody gets more in every bowl. You don't want your guests jealously tallying up the heads and concluding they haven't gotten their "fair share." Ideally there will be so many everyone will lose count. Much like we have with our boil orders.