When I was an Italian American kid back in Brooklyn, Lent was a truly annoying time of the year.\u00a0 Meat was taken off the menu and fish was substituted.\u00a0 But being poor people, we were served this awful white fish of some sort or other, breaded and fried.\u00a0 It took a lot of ketchup to make that stuff palatable.\u00a0 When Camera Girl and I got married and set up our own household I was overjoyed to hear that her family wasn\u2019t observant of the Lenten abstention.\u00a0 We two decided to go for the appearance over the substance.\u00a0 So, ashes on Ash Wednesday and beef, chicken and pork remained on the menu.\u00a0 And when Easter arrived, I put in a request for lamb.\u00a0 Now Camera Girl hates lamb so unsurprisingly it\u2019s probably ham nine out of ten years and lamb once a decade.<\/p>\n
You can see why for the last 45 odd years I\u2019ve never concerned myself with Fat Tuesday.\u00a0 Eating a lot of bad food just to prepare myself for Lent has no rationale for me.\u00a0 But I told Camera Girl it was Fat Tuesday today and asked her what delicacy would be for dinner.\u00a0 She looked at me with naked disdain and said she didn\u2019t know yet and not to expect anything great.\u00a0 This is why women shouldn\u2019t be allowed to vote.\u00a0 Their judgement is clouded by a lack of strategic thinking.\u00a0 Here was her big chance to impress the boss (me) with her ability to think on her feet and all she can come up with is discouraging words.\u00a0 What was needed was a big bold flexible outlook.\u00a0 What I got was negativity and defeatism.\u00a0 Terrible.<\/p>\n
So, I\u2019m forced to imagine what I might want to get if Fat Tuesday were a real thing in my home.\u00a0\u00a0 What comes to mind immediately is some kind of Cajun cuisine.\u00a0 Some kind of gumbo or jambalaya.\u00a0 Maybe something with alligator and craw daddies or whatever the hell they eat down there.\u00a0 And some kind of French pastries with espresso or some other type of strong black coffee with lots of sugar in it.\u00a0 I would sit out on my balcony as a parade of demented masked and costumed drug fiends shimmied by on their garish and outlandish floats and requested the crowd to throw beads at them for some perverse reason.\u00a0 I see myself wearing a white suit and brandishing an ornate walking stick as I regally wave a benediction at the inebriated bacchants.\u00a0 Possibly I would be entertaining a small gathering of the decadent descendants of the plantation aristocracy now reduced to the status of penniless moochers at my table.\u00a0 We would discuss the antebellum origins of the Mardi Gras and the rumors of voodoo and vampirism in the neighborhood.\u00a0 I would tut-tut derisively and hold court on the true goings on; the cult of Cthulhu down in the swamps and bayous and how a recently discovered stone idol proved that the re-emergence of the Cthulhu from his dream death at the bottom of the Atlantic was imminent.<\/p>\n
Or something like that.\u00a0 Well actually, Camera Girl was pulling my leg.\u00a0 She\u2019s making lentils and rice in pastiche, which in Camera Girl\u2019s family is green peppers preserved in oil and vinegar.\u00a0 Which is one of my favorites and come to think about it is a pretty good meal for Lent.\u00a0 Well, forget about the whole Cthulhu thing and also the decadent plantation jazz.\u00a0 Maybe I\u2019ll have some black coffee instead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I was an Italian American kid back in Brooklyn, Lent was a truly annoying time of the year.\u00a0 Meat was taken off the menu<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[288,1263],"tags":[362,3576,3577],"class_list":["post-17999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humor","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","tag-cthulhu","tag-fat-tuesday","tag-lent"],"yoast_head":"\n