Favorite Seafood Memory

I have great camp memories. You know, we’d go to the camp. We’d bring eggs, rice, beans. We wouldn’t bring any really meat proteins because we were going to catch all that or hunt it. Sometimes Mother Nature didn’t give so much. That’s why we had the 25-pound sack of dry shrimp. We became very adept at doing dried shrimp dinners, dried shrimp gumbo, dried shrimp omelets in the morning. You name it, we did it with dry shrimp, which were pretty good, by the way.

But my dad used to make, he called it macaroni aux fruits de mer, which was a fruit of the sea macaroni. Then he made a red sauce, and then it depended on what we caught that day. If we had some bigorneaux, you know, we’d throw that in. If we had oysters, you know, crab, shrimp, fish, all that went in it at different times, usually towards the end of cooking time, because you don’t want to overcook anything, right? But the pasta was cooked, you know, it was like a rigatoni pasta that was cooked in the sauce. It wasn’t cooked first and salted. No, it was cooked in the sauce. And dude, with French bread and a bottle of red wine, we thought we died and gone to heaven. It’s the best thing I ever ate in my life. God, it was so good, you know. And I have a fond memory of my dad doing that.