Crawfish Etouffé

This year's ATA conference took us to New Orleans at the beginning of November. We went a few days early, and took the whole family, since who knows when we'll get back there. We figured it would be an education, and I was certainly looking forward to the regional specialities. Katrina aside, I knew there would be food, and I figured they would prioritize, making what was important to them. I was right.

I was as adventuresome as I could be, trying all sorts of new things (It was funny to note that no one was serving spinach salad, even though the scare was long over). I aimed for combo plates that let me try more than one thing at once. Shrimp gumbo, crawfish étouffé, alligator gumbo (disappointing: the liver-like texture was a real turn-off), pecan pie (with and without chocolate), pralines, smooth court-bouillon, popcorn shrimp, red beans, and fall-apart tender fried catfish. And of course, hot beignets smothered in powdered sugar from the Café du Monde.
Our Halloween day lunch in New Orleans was on a pleasantly sunny day, in a restaurant with its tall windows wide open to the street. I tried a combo plate with a spicy shrimp creole, but the crawfish étouffé won my heart. I was determined to try to make it at home, so I picked up a cookbook in the airport. Once ensconced in my claustophobically cozy airplane seat, I plunged in. No surprise that the recipe called for crawfish (my spell-checker prefers the term crayfish). I figured I should be able to get that locally, as they fish jumbo crayfish right here in Lake Washington, selling it down at the Pike Place Market. The cookbook author assures me it's wonderful with shrimp, so maybe we'll try that first.

But there was a huge surprise: bell pepper. I admit that it's been years since I've eaten bell peppers, since they seem to disagree with me--at least I thought they did. I remember vividly watching my mother cutting the top off of a big green bell pepper, scraping out the seeds, and stuffing it with rice and ground beef & onions, so I know I ate them as a child. But one encounter with them in a Mexican restaurant led me to believe I couldn't manage them anymore. But no matter, that étouffé sat just fine in my belly. So today I bought my first green pepper in two decades, and it simmered away with the shrimp and celery and tabasco sauce (even though the recipe didn't call for that). It was as tasty as I recall, and will definitely enter my repertoire, though I can see it better suited for warm, sultry days. Since we don't get any of that here, rainy ones will have to do.

Oh, and I served it with spinach salad.