Popping the Cork/Crawdad Boil and Cauldron Bubble

Welcome to my new blog, Low-Hanging Fruit! In this blog, I'll do my best to express my personal interest in food and drink. Last February I took a two-week trip to the San Francisco/Sonoma area and I felt inspired by the area and some visits with friends to write about food. I'm moving back to Northern California this Summer, and I hope I can keep this blog updated with regular posts of any new things that I eat, or especially, wine that I drink (hence the title.) Maybe I'll even throw in something I've made, now and then. I'm not a food professional, just a devoted fan.

Though I had planned to launch this blog in Summer, I'd be ignoring the opportunity to write about a few things I'm eating now in Virginia. Specifically, I can thank Mr John Yoblonski for some of the best food I've had while I've lived on the right coast. This man is a food professional. Last Friday night he treated a group to a crawdad boil. It's a recurring event, this being the first of the Spring season, and they never disappoint. The meal is remarkable because it doesn't seem to be possible on the small scale; it always feeds a crowd.

The apparatus required, coupled with live ingredients makes the cooking a spectacular feat. But the service is pure brutality: crawdads, mushrooms, onions, potatoes, lemons, sausage, and corn-on-the-cob are piled onto a paper-lined table, having macerated for hours in their mutual juices, generously enhanced with Cajun spices. The diners serve themselves hand-to-mouth from the mound. Everything is whole, and the flavors burst. The crawdads themselves surrender their tails without resistance, and their heads yield rich juices and a few morsels of tender meat. I manage the spice with bites of potato and swigs of a sturdy ale. It's a feast. I urge you not to overlook the mushrooms; they are a secret Ambrosia.