Shrove Tuesday
The last day before the beginning of Lent on the Gulf Coast that once belonged to France, it is Mardi Gras, “Fat Tuesday”: Laissez les bon temps rouler!
It was first celebrated [1703] in Mobile, Alabama, but the big show these days is in New Orleans, and it is a holiday in the state of Louisiana, because people wouldn’t show up for work anyway, so why fight it.
The tradition is to serve King cake [great recipe], which is a circle pastry with white frosting on top, sprinkled with sugar colored purple, gold, and green. If that weren’t bad enough, they now put the figurine of a baby in the dough [a dried bean is traditional], and whoever finds it in their piece is supposed to be lucky. Actually if you find it and don’t choke on it, I guess you are lucky. You should use a small ceramic figurine, as some of the cheap plastic versions melt in the oven [yummy].
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We had pancakes for dinner. 🙂 That’s our tradition on Shrove Tuesday.
One thing I do miss from Texas is the ‘Texas one-eyed stack’ of pancakes! At least, that’s what they were called at the place we stopped for breakfast. I don’t even remember the name of the town. But it was good. I think they were buckwheat, a stack of 6 thick pancakes with bacon on the side and assorted accouterments provided. And a decent coffee too! A luxury in the USA! Really GOOD coffee was damned hard to find, and yet, all the US movies make out that everyone loves the great coffee there. As far as I could discover, only people who’d never left the USA thought that. 😉 🙂
The ridding the house of stored flour and fat in anticipation of Lent is pretty widespread, and is a variation on Spring festivals in many older belief systems. The Slavs call it “Butter Days” [Maslenitsa]. It also features pancakes [blini] and lots of butter.
Oh, yes, the coffee sold in the US just sucks. It is generally old because of the industrial systems used. Even if you buy the beans and grind them yourself, they will be old and not stored in optimal conditions.
I once had a source for great Colombian beans, but the War On Drug™ made that a PITA. I don’t doubt that at least one source was not above smuggling, but it would have probably been emeralds or Incan artifacts, which are much more valuable than agricultural products. Obviously something is going on when someone has no visible means of support, but never runs out of cash.
Yummy… pancakes. I can eat them for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Very true about the coffee. I am always on a quest for a better bean. I’ve found some decent coffee at World Market. They have a variety of free trade coffees from South and Central America. Recently I found a bag of Kenya AA, very nice. I stay away from that pre-ground stuff in a can though.
The beans from Africa probably get here quicker in container ships than the shipments from Central and South America that come in the slower bulk freighters into New Orleans and then are distributed by barge or rail. There was a lot of coffee and bananas destroyed in those warehouses when the levees failed in 2005, and it had been sitting there a while.
The “fair trade” coffee is generally better because it isn’t caught up in the industrial stream that moves at the pace of the big roasters, not the ripeness of the beans.
Yup! I love the fair trade coffee’s, and there are a few good ones. I currently use beans from Ethiopia (blue mountain). Expensive as hell, but I decided I deserved a treat.
I just spent a fun day reinstalling Windows after it totally crapped out this morning for no reason I could figure out!! Really… I didn’t install or change anything! Even system restore or backups wouldn’t fix it. *shrug* I suspect that the system reg became corrupt somehow. Oh well… I wanted to test a new system anyway, and the old one was getting slower every day (as Windoze does!) LOL
I really hope there is a special hell reserved for Gates. Where he can spend all eternity with the Bushmoron, Cheney, Rove etc and the rightwing evangelical nutters and Murdock and a few others. I could just about go to bed with a big grin thinking about that! LOL
Oh, I as going to mention something… but got sad thinking about it.
When LadyMin was here and we went to Marysville, we found a little store in a tiny town called Taggerty, about half way between Marysville and Alexandra. This store had some 250g plain brown bags of coffee (not like lunch bags, proper lined and sealed coffee bags. I was a little suspicious of course, but desperate for a coffee! So I got one… It was delicious!! We went back, and they were all out! 🙁 Apparently it was made locally, Was a very nice mellow coffee. 🙂
Latest fire stats are:
210 people dead, 30 still unaccounted for
450,000+ ha burned out
Over 3,500 buildings destroyed
735 ha of fruit trees, olives and vines
7,000 ha of plantation timber
190 ha of crops
168,000 ha of pasture
2,150 sheep, 1,207 cattle
An unknown number of horses, goats, llama’s, alpacas, camels, poultry and pigs
Several million wildlife animals and birds
The Water Authority is saying that the Maroondah Reservoir may have to be decommissioned if the contamination from ash, salt and other materials is as severe as the think it might be. LadyMin has some photo’s of the Maroondah Reservoir. It was a beautiful place. We came down a road called the Black Spur which is a narrow winding highway covered on both sides by ancient huge ferns, All gone now. 🙁 She thought I was just playing a trick on her because she was just getting used to driving here. 😉 But I think she discovered that it was worth the trouble. Unlike me with NOLA, at least she got to see it before it was destroyed.
*sigh*
It’s pouring rain right now. We don’t need more moisture. So unfair. I’d like to send it somewhere where it’s needed. And I just bought two rainbarrels. That I probably won’t need if the weather patterns continue.
It’s sad to believe that so much has been destroyed. I am still amazed by the giant ferns, and had to park (on the narrow road, yes) and go see them close up. Driving on the narrow roads was much easier than driving in the city… although it takes a brain reset to drive on “the wrong side” regardless. 🙂
Windoze manages to corrupt itself after about 8 months or so… I think it’s a feature! My system decided to do just that yesterday. It keeps announcing that the “System Has Recovered from a Serious Error”. Maybe it has, but it hasn’t cleared the flag that makes it keep telling me about it. And I’m really busy with work right now with no time to reinstall. Yes, hell for Gates is sounding like a plan.
LadyMin´s last blog post..I Love Red Flowers
On the destruction, I know the feeling. There are a lot of things I liked about San Diego county in California, that simply no longer exist. OTOH, at some point they would have been destroyed by men trying to turn them into cash, so they were doomed.
It’s the animals that are hard to take. They didn’t create the mess, but they have paid the ultimate price. We need to stop screwing things up in hopes of making a dollar. The money isn’t going to last, as people should now realize, and you can’t ever replace what was wiped out.
People will rebuild, and we can hope that they do it wisely, but there are always the wastrels who just want to loot for the short term.
Windows had a major security update yesterday, and that may have set off the problems. I have to keep this machine vanilla for business reasons, so it has been fairly robust. The world of Windows is a soul-sucking mess, and Gates should pay for eternity.