Marti Gras

Happy Fat Tuesday!

Yes, we are neither alcoholics or Catholics, but we are always ready for a party.

This year we decided to celebrate by making a delicious batch of jambalaya.

Karl in his beads hard at work cooking.

We added telapia, chicken, spicy sausage, and shrimp.

There were of course, crawdads.

Karl and one of the little guys.

The group as we were about to cut them open.

There wasn’t much meat to them:

Krysta and Zac arrived with little miss Karen.

For dessert we made a King Cake. It is basically a sweet bread made like a swiss roll that has cream cheese filling. I used low fat cream cheese and whole wheat flour to make it a little more edible.

Here it is, about to go into the oven. The tradition of the King cake goes something like this:

It’s name is from the 3 Kings of the New Testament. I thought it was for the King of Kings, but it isn’t. It all begin on the day of Epiphany:

which falls on January 6, is a Christian feast day that celebrates the revelation of God the Son as a human being in Jesus Christ. Western Christians commemorate principally (but not solely) the visitation of the Biblical Magi to the Baby Jesus, and thus Jesus’ physical manifestation to the Gentiles. Eastern Christians commemorate the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River, seen as his manifestation to the world as the Son of God.

According to Wikipedia anyway.

You bake a King (or in more recent tradition, a plastic baby, symbolic of the baby that the wise men found) into the cake and who ever finds it is considered king of the day. Also there is the tradition that who ever gets it will have a baby soon.

We also had lots of beads for everyone. Karen really liked them, that’s why she took them all and put them into a bowl.