By KAREN MADORIN
Flipping calendar pages into the fish-eating Lenten season makes me think of local fish fries and shrimp recipes. Apparently, others feel the same as I recently saw ads for a crawdad boil in Colby and another humorous promotion for eating mudbug butts. Both triggered fond memories.
When we first married, we lived in a cottonwood-shaded paradise at the Meade Fish Hatchery where my brand-new husband worked as a fish culturist. Our CCC-era adobe apartment attached to the hatchery workshop, enclosed by a courtyard. Artesian wells supplied our water and gushed from the earth at a nearby picnic ground. Deer roamed nearby, and birds of every kind woke us up and put us to bed.
Because it was a fish hatchery, ponds full of fish in various stages of development punctuated the southwest Kansas sage prairie and rolling sandhills. Coming home daily from work in town, I anticipated the high point of my day: riding next to my sweetheart to the rearing ponds. Once we reached them, the show began as he launched floating pellets to a foaming rise of writhing, hungry catfish. Our black Lab’s shoreline cheering section added to the excitement.
While those were wonderful experiences, a favorite memory involves the time he drained a pond, and we collected stranded fish. After we’d sloshed about salvaging those, real fun began. Crawdads filled the pond bottom, offering easy pickin’s for anyone willing to ignore pincers or mud-weighted tennies.
Lugging a 5-gallon bucket, we collected one mudbug after another. Our Lab joined the fun, barking at alien-looking creatures waving snapping pincers at him as he nudged them with his nose. He yiped in surprise when one latched onto his fleshy cheek. Having gotten pinched several times ourselves, we swiftly detached his painful hitchhiker. After spending a couple hours under late summer sun, exotic meal ingredients weighted our bucket and we headed home to prepare our feast.
We soaked the critters in artesian water to flush their innards. Later, we filled a huge kettle with clean water and Old Bay Seasoning and set it to boil. In went the fresh harvest and out came food fit for kings. I’d eaten gulf shrimp growing up and tasted lobster. By far, these freshly collected and boiled crayfish won the gastronomic taste test.
As delicious as these are, I have friends and family who can’t imagine devouring them. The idea of popping off tails, removing shells and dark veins, and savoring such morsels disgusts them. I’m guessing for the squeamish willing to sample this protein perfection, a factory somewhere takes care of the untidy part of eating these and offers folks prepped, packaged crawdad meat. Figuring out the messy eating process had us laughing continuously.
Every year around Mardi Gras, I dream of recipes I didn’t know 48 years ago and wish we still lived at the fish hatchery. If that happened, during pond drainings, we’d harvest enough crawdads to make boiled crayfish, etouffee, jambalaya, and delights I haven’t explored. I’d eat them twice a day for weeks if I could. Then I’d finish the meal off with cinnamon and sugar-coated beignets that I’ve learned to make since that first rustic mudbug boil in paradise.
As it is, I hope to see an ad for a crawdad fundraiser close by. I’m ready for a mess.
Karen Madorin is a retired teacher, writer, photographer, outdoors lover, and sixth-generation Kansan.