Happy Mardi Gras – Let’s Eat All The Doughnuts
Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday or Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Tuesday or Paczki Day is the day before Lent. I won’t go into what Lent is because, frankly, I don’t have the background to do it justice. The gist of it is that you have to give up all the good things in your kitchen – lard, flour, sugar, eggs (and more) for Lent.
The cool thing is that those Christians are a sneaky lot. In an effort to get all the rich foods out of the kitchen before Lent begins, Fat Tuesday became the day you got to eat all that loveliness usually in the form of pancakes (thus Pancake Tuesday) or doughnuts (Paczki Day). Have you ever stopped and translated Mardi Gras? Yup, Fat Tuesday!
Growing up my mom always made me pancakes or crepes for Pancake Tuesday. Because there is nothing better in the world than food holidays and my mom concurred!
These days I lean more towards the doughnut, so we’ve been celebrating Paczki Day. Unfortunately, our favourite Paczki came from the now-closed Granowska’s. We liked them so much that we’ve rented cars to go fetch them and one year our friend Heather even played paczki-courier to get us a dozen when we were stuck in the office.
So, today is an excellent day to search out the cities best pancakes and doughnuts.
What are you going to eat on Fat Tuesday: pancakes or doughnuts or some other fatty sweet treat?
Obviously, I pick doughnuts!