My house is next to the Thames. The place is very beautiful with lots of trees, birds and wild animals like deer, rabbits and foxes. In the river there are ducks, geese, herons, and of course, fish. My husband has a fishing rod and likes to fish, but he never catches our dinner.
But my landlord, Mr Tate, says there is also an invader in the river – American crayfish, a species of freshwater lobster. There are indigenous species of crayfish, but their American cousins are bigger and they carry a disease which kills the native crayfish.
For this reason, it's good to catch them, and it's very good to eat them because they are delicious! Mr Tate says he is bored of them because he eats so many – they are very easy to catch.
In the morning he puts bait in the trap – you can use chicken, fish skin, or even cat food for bait. He throws the trap in the river. The next morning he pulls the trap out of the water and it's full of crayfish. The crayfish are really big, twelve to fifteen centimetres in length. They look like small, grey and blue lobsters. My dogs are very curious, they want to play with these strange animals, but crayfish have big claws and can give a nasty pinch – especially to a dog's nose!
There are lots of ways to cook crayfish. Many recipes are American, unsurprisingly as that's where the crayfish come from. A crayfish boil is a spicy stew of crayfish, boiled with potatoes, onions, garlic and lots of spices. You can also cook them on the barbecue, add them to stews, make risotto, or use them in the classic New Orleans dish gumbo – a thick stew of shellfish, meat and vegetables.
So now we have delicious, healthy,free food right on our doorstep. But considering how many there are, and how easy they are to catch, I think we might soon be bored of crayfish too.