Crawfish Stuffed Jalapenos

Leftover crawfish?  If you live in the south, it happens after nearly every boil, to the point that it’s almost part of the tradition—plunking down around the table with friends & family to peel all the little critters you couldn’t finish off.  There are plenty of options for what to do with leftover crawfish (like the Crawmlette or Crawchos), but what if you only have a little bit of meat to work with?  Here’s an option for you: mix with a little cheese, stuff inside of a jalapeno, and then wrap it in bacon.

Last week The Hubs & I took an extended Memorial Week trip down to Houston to visit his sister & her family.  As part of the trip, my nephew K asked if I would make crawfish for him, since he’d never tried one before.  Always happy to oblige a food request, I brought my 3-gallon pot & boil seasoning down with me. 

Since only K was really interested in trying the crawfish (my other nephew & nieces were iffy about the idea, and my sis-in-law doesn’t eat seafood), I decided to do a traditional shrimp/sausage boil, and then just pick up a few pounds of already cooked crawfish from the most popular local crawfish place (The Crawfish Shack in Crosby, TX…good stuff).

Our Feast!  Gulf shrimp, crawfish, pecan-smoked andouille, red potatoes & sweet corn. 

While we did as much damage as possible, at the end of the meal about a third of the crawfish were still left.  So I peeled the rest & brought the meat home with us.  There was only about a half cup of leftovers, so not enough to make much of an etoufee or bisque (or even Crawchos, really).  Thought about making some quesadillas, but then Primeaux suggested stuffed jalapenos.  Since we were grilling anyway, jalapenos won out.

 

INGREDIENTS:

1/2 cup crawfish tails/claw meat, chopped

1.5 tablespoons low fat cream cheese (try it with Creole cream cheese if you can find it!)

1/2 tsp boil seasoning or Cajun seasoning

1 green onion, diced

4 large or 8 small jalapenos, with caps removed and seeds scraped out

4 slices reduced sodium bacon

 

DIRECTIONS:

Mix the crawfish, cream cheese, seasoning & green onion in a small bowl until well combined.

Place in a sandwich bag (we reused the bag we brought the crawfish home in) and snip off a half-inch hole in one corner to create a piping bag.  Then pipe the crawfish mixture into the jalapenos. 

Use the end of the bacon strip to cover the open end, then wrap around the jalapeno & secure with a toothpick. (If you use small jalapenos you may be able to wrap them with only half a strip of bacon.)  Grill on the top rack for about 5 minutes on each side (or until the bacon is crispy), or in your oven on an aluminum covered cookie sheet at 400F.

Since we only made 4 stuffed jalapenos, we had some of the crawfish stuffing mix left over… stay tuned to see what we make with it!!!