Crawfish season in Lake Charles, Louisiana!

On Wednesday, after a noisy thunderstorm overnight, we packed up the coach in the rain and headed south. And when it rains here, whole counties flood. None of this little bit of sprinkling stuff. We drove over bridges whose streams or rivers were so swollen that the water level was pushing up the low branches of the trees. Never mind a shoreline or river banks...those were gone and the flooding, far inland. When we arrived at our new campground, Sam Houston Jones State Park, the campsite just across from ours was buried in 3 inches of water over the entire site...like a very shallow Olympic swimming pool. Well, maybe not quite that big.

I could see there would, again, be no marshmallow roasting.

As we are visiting Lake Charles at the height of crawfish season, we endeavored to find a good place to eat them. We requested a restaurant recommendation for boiled crawfish from the cashier at the Park's office (not wanting to repeat any of the infamous choices we had made recently) and then proceeded to check out her recommendation on Yelp.com, just to be safe. It looked promising.

Cackle? Raven? No idea...but it's loud.
(Turns out it's a Grackle!)

We then drove to the Visitor Center for sight-seeing ideas for Thursday, and found the center just next to Lake Charles, the lake. We walked along the lake's edge on the Lakefront Promenade where literally hundreds of birds have taken up residence. One kind of bird that looks to our untrained eyes like a raven (but a local said may be called a cackle), was gathered by the dozens in various treetops screaming to each other. It sounded liked a recording of crazy bird noises, it was very amusing.

Next we drove around the Charpentier Historic District, a 40-block neighborhood of historic homes built by different carpenters and craftsmen over the years, resulting in an extremely eclectic mix of beautiful houses. We didn't get any pictures of the homes, though, with the traffic behind us and the heavy clouds above us.

Boiled Crawfish....EAT ME!

From there, we were bound to put the restaurant recommendation and Yelp reviews to the test at Steamboat Bill's On the Lakefront. Wowsa. Now, I've never had boiled crawfish or any other truly Louisianian dishes, so we were anxious to try it. Steamboat Bill's did not disappoint, in fact, the food made up for all of the other less than stellar meals we've had in months...maybe years. The boiled crawfish comes by the pound, seasoned generously with Creole seasoning. Crawfish look, and taste, a bit like a cross between crabs and peel-and-eat shrimp. They look more like shrimp (heads on, antennae standing at attention, tails curled underneath themselves), but taste closer to crab. They were fantastic! The modus operandi of eating these 'mudbugs' is to snap off the tail, then eat the meat from the tail. The remaining body cavity on up is called the 'head', which you are supposed to suck by wrapping your lips around the abdomen and sucking the drop or two of highly spiced water and other crawfish "material". This second procedure left my lips swollen and stinging within a few minutes, so I relegated the remaining head-sucking of my crawfish to Ken.

We totally enjoyed the crawfish, but this was only the beginning of Steamboat Bill's impression on us. Next we had Boudin, described in a visitor magazine as a melding "of the best from Cajun, German and Creole culinary traditions that traces its history back to Canada by way of France." In any case, its a sausage made with bits of pork, rice, green onions, and parsley, along with a bunch of seasonings, and Steamboat Bill's rolls them into big balls and cooks 'em. The Boudin balls arrived with what tasted like a side of spicy ranch for dipping and we were hooked. These things are awesome. But, even better, were a pair of Shrimp Pistolettes, an odd name for what looks like a savory beignet with shrimp etouffee in it. A beignet is a deep-fried bun and shrimp etouffee is saucy, spicy (though not hot) amalgamation of yumminess with shrimp in it....at least that's how it tasted to me at this restaurant.

Boiled Crawfish

We topped off the meal with pecan pralines, recommended by a Yelp reviewer who clearly knows good food. The pralines were huge, loaded with pecans suspended in the praline goo, and most of both of them remain as of this writing. They are super tasty, but very sweet as pralines normally are, so we are extending their enjoyment over the next several days. Fabulous food at an extremely casual restaurant (think crab house, but without the brown paper tablecloths) with very quick and friendly service, and good prices. We will definitely be back.

We ended the evening with a luckless trip to a local casino. Louisiana's major cash crops, other than casinos, are rice and pine trees, along with, of course, crawfish, though we found more casinos than anything else. What a day!