My wonderful friend Kevin, and his partner Juliet host an amazing Crawfish Boil every year. It’s one of the best parties of the year and such a special treat to get to all-you-can-eat Crawfish made by a real Cajun. Kevin shares his culture with us by cooking an amazing meal of crawfish, corn, potatoes, and andouille sausage in a giant pot. It’s usually hosted in South Philly in a beautiful garden and goes all night long with lots and lots of beer to cool us off as the night goes on. Each round of the boil gets hotter and hotter as more seasoning is added to the water. By the end, you eat a crawfish, sip your beer, and repeat until all the crawfish are gone. Here’s Kevin piling crawfish, corn, potatoes and sausage into the pot, boiling it, and dumping it out onto a giant table. It’s quite the process. Then we all dig in and eat to our hearts content. Kevin shows the newbies how to each crawfish.
1. Grab the crawfish and twist to separate the tail from the head.
2. Suck the head. This is spicy! Discard.
3. Pinch the tail to break the shell. Pull the meat from the tail. If you do it right, the digestive tract comes out too.
4. Eat the meat.
5. Sip your beer.
6. Repeat.So gorgeous! What a feast.

While having a boil of your own is a big production that I can’t teach you about, I can share with you a delicious Cajun dinner and dessert. The Seafood Big Mamou is an amazing dish made with a spicy tomato butter and the Banana Foster Bread Pudding is absolutely to die for. I made it this year for the Crawfish Boil. It was a serious hit with it’s salty caramel sauce over rich and creamy banana brioche bread pudding.

Seafood Big Mamou
Banana Foster Bread Pudding

Here’s the gorgeous garden that hosted the Boil. What a gorgeous night!