COVID Crawfish Cookout
By Deborah Willenborg
USA Rice
Even the most gifted home cooks get in culinary ruts, and when you add circumscribed grocery shopping as a result of the coronavirus pandemic to the mix, it's challenging to come up with something new to make for dinner. So when the opportunity to work with an unusual or hard-to-find ingredient presents itself, you have to jump at the chance.
"Several weeks ago, I was checking in with some of our Louisiana members and they were sharing the problems farmers there were having with moving their crawfish harvest," said Michael Klein, USA Rice vice president of communications, marketing, and domestic promotion. "That side of their business has been severely impacted by restaurants shutting down and orders for social distancing putting an end to large group gatherings for traditional crawfish boils. When I made an off-hand comment about how nice it would be to have some of their product in Washington, they offered to ship up as much as I could handle. I notified our Washington USA Rice staff about the crawfish offer and we very quickly put together an order for 40 pounds."