Fat Tuesday

Today is Mardi Gras (which is French for Fat Tuesday), the last hurrah before Lent begins. Tomorrow on Ash Wednesday I'll be fasting, so today was all about excess.

I started the day with a big bowl of wonderfully rich leftover fried rice.  After a healthy lunch I stopped at the grocery store on my way to work and got a chocolate frosted doughnut.  On my break I treated myself to a cup of coffee.  At the end of the day I met Hubby Tony at a Mexican fusion restaurant about five minutes away from the mall.

We started with drinks and chips with perfectly spicy salsa. Tony ordered a taco sampler platter and I chose a carne asada quesadilla. We traded bites of our entrees, but mine was so good I wasn't really interested in sharing.  When the waitress came to take our empty plates away she offered dessert. Everything on the list sounded decadent. I let Tony pick and he chose chocolate empanadas.

Several minutes later the waitress brought out a rectangular plate containing two fat empanadas drizzled with chocolate sauce. Four tiny scoops of vanilla ice cream and a couple of dollops of whipped cream were arranged along one side.

I used my fork to cut off one point of of an empanada, which I dipped in whipped cream before I put it into my mouth. The piece was predominantly fried dough, but there was something funny about the taste.  I followed that bite with a little ice cream, then tried again. This time when I cut into the pastry a light brown sauce oozed out, followed by a pea and a cube of carrot!   Instead of being sweet our 'dessert' pastries were savory. 

The next time the waitress walked by we showed her our plate. She was extremely apologetic, and said there was a new cook in the kitchen who must have read her order wrong. They offered us a new dessert, but we realized that we weren't hungry any more and passed.  No use making ourselves sick just because it was a day of surfeit.