From Denny: As a Louisiana blogger, we sure do appreciate all the support we have received all over the country since the disaster of the BP oil spill. "The Early Show" from CBS did their part by announcing the Gulf coast shrimp grounds have been cleared by the government testers as safe to eat. Those fishing areas reopened to shrimpers. Louisiana shrimpers provide about 20 to 30 percent of America's shrimp.
There are three agencies who have been testing hundreds of samples from all over the Gulf: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Food and Drug Administration. So far so good as the samples are coming back clean.
We do love shrimp boils down here in Louisiana and CBS decided to celebrate the reopening of the fishing in the Gulf with this great recipe to do your own shrimp boil. And make sure you add a cold crisp beer to wash it all down! :)
Make sure when you boil the shrimp that when they are cooked they curl up. If they are straight, then discard them because they were not fresh and are not the best idea to eat.
Pull out those old newspapers and cover your outdoor tables because a shrimp boil is messy - and good. Also, if you are in a part of the country that still has summer high heat, make sure you wrap up those shrimp shells in that newspaper and then put that wrap in the freezer until your garbage day. Trust me; you don't want that horrible smell just killing your garbage can, especially if it's stored in a closed garage. Here in Louisiana we always freeze the shrimp shells in newspaper and then dash out at the last minute to deposit it in our garbage cans when we see the garbage trucks rolling down our street. :)
The Louisiana seafood industry employs about 28,000 people and impacts the national economy by $2.4 billion a year. Louisiana is the number one producer of blue crabs, shrimp and oysters in the nation.
