Tasty Tuesday: Crawfish Etouffe

It started with a Facebook recipe shared by my husband to me on Thursday evening. He loves all things crawfish and this is definitely the season to play with those recipes. Good thing though is you can get frozen crawfish tails any time of year in most grocery stores, so this recipe is NOT limited to only crawfish season. Crawfish season is usually the entire length of spring (really starting in late winter) with the height around March and April.

Anyway, I sent a text to my husband who had to work on Friday and asked what he would like for dinner. I often ask, but on days that I do not work I try to make it a priority to allow him to make the choice if he desires to. Guess what he asked for? Yep. Crawfish Etouffe. I had never made it before, but have been making more cajun dishes than I used to. When I saw the recipe I knew there were some elements missing so I really adapted it A LOT to be more authentic. I can tell you ~ it probably took maybe at most an extra 5 to 10 minutes but the time and effort were a huge success! We ended up inviting a couple we hadn't seen in a long time over and it was a hit with them as well.

Ingredients
1 cup of butter
1 cup of flour
Chopped veggies (2 onions, 1 green bell pepper, 4 stalks of celery, 3 serrano peppers)
1 bunch of green onions chopped (top 1/3rd reserved for topping as served)
4 cloves of garlic minced
1 can Golden Mushroom soup
4 soup cans of water (5 if too thick)
2# of crawfish tails (Defrosted)
2 bay leaves
1-2 TBS Nolan Ryan Steak Seasoning
2 caps of liquid crawfish boil
Dashes of : Chipolte chili powder and cayenne pepper,
salt, and black pepper to taste

Directions
1. In a LARGE stock/soup pot melt butter and add flour. Whisk continually until rue develops a nice caramel color.
2. Add in chopped veggies and 2/3 of green onions and stir well allow veggies to soften. Cook for about 5 to 10 minutes.
3. Add in can of soup and 4 cans of water stirring well to combine to make sure that flour gets incorporated into liquid. This will become thicker as it cooks together.
4. Add in crawfish, liquid crawfish boil, seasonings and bay-leaves and simmer on medium to medium low to allow the flavors to meld together.
5. Taste for additional seasoning.
6. Serve over rice.