The low-country boil, as I said, has corn and potatoes and shrimp and, um, some other meat, too. I wanna say pork, maybe. It has a lot of different things in it. It’s like a stew. It’s like a seafood-type stew with corn and potatoes and things. Anyway, it has packets of spices that you buy at the store for it, and my husband had gotten them specifically for this particular instance, and the whole thing gets put in a very large boiling pot. And it is put on — at this point in time he has it on the grill outside, and he’s cooking it out there, and it’s been going for a few hours before the people come. And when they come, they are given, you know, big bowls and told to come up. In the process — so, my husband had put in one of the spice packets, and then he had looked at the amount of things and the number of people we had coming, and decided to add a second spice packet. That was where the mistake lied.
So anyway, [cough] everyone comes and everyone is excited because we’re having this, and, of course, it’s fall, so other people have brought salads and rolls and desserts and things like that. We’re just providing the main course. So everyone is all prepared, and they are looking forward ’cause it smells fabulous. It just smells wonderful. So people are coming over and they’re lining up by the, by the grill to get their, um, low-country boil, and my husband dishes it all up and everybody starts heading to the various tables and seats to start eating.
And all of a sudden, people are taking bites of the shrimp and their eyes are opening wide, and somebody says, “Boy, this is kind of spicy,” and it just goes on from there. My husband has put in two spice packs, and we are twice as spicy as we need to be for this. So there are, like, I don’t know, 20-some people who are kind of trying to brush off the spices on their shrimp and their potatoes and corn. The potatoes are the best of the things to eat. People are eating the potatoes big time ’cause they taste pretty good. The corn is okay, but the shrimp has really absorbed the, the spices, and that’s the part everyone is looking forward to, and it’s quite a, quite a thing.
Well, my husband tries to water it down, and that helps a little, but we had some people that came late, and we had already taken that off the fire, and by the time it had — they had got there, it had really, like, boiled into a major deal. And it was so spicy, and I — all I know is is that they drank quite a bit of beer to go with their, their low-country boil, and that was quite the event.
To this day, people that came that day will kind of joke about — ’cause I volunteered one time. I said, “Well, we could have the golf picnic again,” and somebody said, “No, your husband might cook.” And my husband’s a wonderful cook, he really is, but that day, I don’t know what made him think that we needed to have two of those spice packets. But he thought we did, so, oh my goodness.