Fat Tuesday

Fat Tuesday, It’s an unofficial holiday for many in the metro Detroit area: Fat Tuesday, also known as Paczki Day. A Polish-American tradition, several celebrate on Fat Tuesday — the day before Lent begins – by gorging on paczki, which are calorie-laden, deep-fried pastries filled with the most delicious creams, custards and jellies.

Traditionally, the reason for making paczki (pronounced “pooonch-key”) was to use up all the lard, sugar, eggs and fruit in the house, because the ingredients were forbidden to be consumed due to Catholic fasting practices during Lent, according to Michigan.org.

The tradition has evolved over the years and now, come Fat Tuesday, Americans rush out to get the tastiest paczki they can find. Ask any metro Detroiter and they’ll tell you, the best place to go for pazcki is Hamtramck.

That’s where WWJ’s Mike Campbell found Denise Star, an executive at Compuware, standing in line at the New Palace Bakery to buy a whopping 19 dozen paczki for her office.

“I’ve been doing this for 24 years straight and I take them to the employees I work with,” she said.

Fat Tuesday | USsPost.com

Fat Tuesday | USsPost.com:Happy Fat Tuesday from The Oval, where every day is Mardi Gras. Today President Obama has some good news to celebrate from Afghanistan as he continues his effort to provide jobs to Americans.

The most pertinent date this week for the White House is tomorrow, Feb. 17 — first anniversary of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which spread $862 billion in federal largesse around the nation. The administration is fanning out coast to coast all week to promote the spending, and the jobs that come with it.

Vice President Biden, fresh from the Olympics in Vancouver, will kick off the week’s celebration today with a visit to economically depressed Saginaw, Michigan. Before the week is out, Cabinet members will be in Ohio, Georgia, Texas and Virginia. Obama wraps up the week with events in Colorado and Nevada.

Today, the president will tout the joys of job training at an electrical workers union headquarters in Lanham, Maryland. There he is expected to announce that the government will guarantee more than $8 billion in loans to build the first U.S. nuclear power plant in nearly three decades in Burke, Georgia, according to The Associated Press.

The rest of Obama’s day is under wraps — private meetings at the White House with his HUD, EPA and Defense chiefs. It’s becoming more typical for the president to remain in private these days, says The Oval’s chum and CBS Radio correspondent Mark Knoller: four days last week he was neither seen nor heard, a record for his presidency.

Whether in public or private, the president should be pleased today: a top Taliban commander has been captured by U.S. and Afghan forces.

On the other hand, Obama’s policy of engagement with Iran appears to be disappearing, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says that nation is taking on the feel of a military dictatorship.

That’s not the feeling here in Washington, where the federal government, fresh from a snow week and Presidents’ Day, will brave the Capital’s still snow-infested roads and head back to work — late.

And so we leave you, at least until later this morning, with White House counselor Valerie Jarrett’s last Olympics post on the White House blog — a paean to patriotism. Be safe out there on Fat Tuesday!

(Posted by Richard Wolf)

Source:  content.usatoday.com