Ain't no party like a crawfish party

“Lis, when this is done, I’ll officially be a swede.  And have proven myself a man. But you better step away.  When this gets opened, the smell could induce labor” [EDITOR NOTE - THIS ALL OCCURRED AND WAS WRITTEN IN SEPTEMBER, PRE-LUCY]

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In Atlanta, the fall was all about festivals – whether they were food fests, art fests, or wine/beer fests, every weekend could be spent celebrating something.  Here it’s different.  They still have seasonal parties most weekends, but they are more informal neighborhood affairs – usually involving seafood and schnapps. Lots and lots of schnapps. 

Our first party this year was a neighborhood Swedish crawfish fest.  We had heard about this for a long time now, but last year the plans just never came together.  Our new neighborhood gets together every year for one  though, so we were excited to be a part of it.  When the invitation first got put in our mailbox, we weren’t sure the details.  Do we give money to someone to get the supplies?  Who has a pot big enough for the whole neighborhood? Then we found out that it was more of a potluck style – everyone gets their own food ready at home, and shows up with their dinner and just eat together.  We knew that Swedish crawfish would be a little different than what we were used to – instead of Cajun seasoning, they would use dill (obviously), and instead of being a one-pot dish, they would be cold (weird).  They are also served with cheese pie, boiled potatoes, and bread.   That sounded like a good plan, but we wanted to play up our American-ness a bit so we reached out to some of our N’awlins family and friends for recipe recommendations. 

Day of the party, we looked outside and the neighbors had set up a HUGE tent with 3-4 tables underneath.  Maybe 20+ people all together. We were the last ones ready, so we showed up with a huge steaming bowl overflowing with corn, potatoes, Andouille, and crawfish. Lis also made a batch of her (now) world famous Cajun cornbread.  Everything was FANTASTIC.  Neighbors kept walking by asking to trade for some of our crawfish – which we were happy to do.  The cornbread was easily the biggest hit of the night, everyone loved it. Every few minutes, people would take a break from cold dill crawfish to sing a song and have a group schnapps.  Good times all around. 

Once dinner was over, Lis took Calvin inside to get him ready for bed.  One of our friends asked if I needed to head in as well – Lis could kind of see where the night was going and said it was probably best if I hung out as long as possible.  So now my job was to make friends, and make friends the only way I know how – through large quantities of booze.

Once the sun went down  and the crawfish were put away, the schnapps and beers managed to stay on the table.    A lot of the adults were still out, and kids were out until way past midnight.  This fact (and that the folks not outside were probably sleeping) did NOT deter the party from quickly turning into a discussion on the finer points of Scandinavian death metal.  After a few more hours of “networking” and being told that I “was not made of sugar, thatj’s for damn sure” (I think that was a compliment), I decided to go to bed on the couch downstairs because calvin was waking up very, very shortly.

One thing I had FORGOTTEN about evidently was that at some point that night we had agreed and set a date for me to become fully Swedish.  Not only did we set a date, but we put it into our phones.

I only remembered this two weeks later. 

(Part II – Surstromming coming soon!)