By:
The Dude on the Right
With Ash Wednesday being tomorrow, and today being Dude Tuesday, I mean Fat Tuesday, I’m supposed to be having pazcki because, well, I’m Polish, I guess, and how pazcki comes out “ponchki” or “poonchki” still makes me scratch my head. Here in Chicago, their pazckis are giant, nearing softball sized, and filled with stuff, whereas the version my mom used to make was just this dough ball, maybe the size of a tennis ball, cooked in oil and covered with powdered sugar. It came out as this greasy thing of cooked dough with a touch of sweetness, but maybe it was the oil, maybe it was the dough mix, maybe it was the powdered “don’t breath in when you eat it” sweetness, or maybe it was just the love that mom put into it when she made them, but in any event it was always something to look forward to in the old Dude-Homestead when I lived there. With my moving away from the old country of Lorain, oHIo, years ago, Mom always thought of me, sometimes shipping me her pazckis to me to indulge in at the normal time, but mostly, with her being the freezing maniac that she was, usually when she made her pazcki she would take about half a dozen of them, put them in a freezer bag, freeze them (duh!), and when I would make it home for Easter, there they were, after thawing, nicely warmed out of the microwave, sprinkled with powdered sugar, and still loaded with greasy, sweety goodness!
The thing is normally, on Fat Tuesday, for me the only thing that comes to mind about pazcki is how the versions they sell (and now totally exploit) in Chicagoland seem to just end up being these larger, filled-with-something donuts, and how I would know there would be a nice surprise come Easter when I made the trek back to the old country. But this year, with mom’s passing away, it was another one of those days when I realized another thing I’m going to miss because of the passing of my parents last year. Those days come up every now and then for me, as I’m sure they do for anyone who loses people they love, but keeps occurring to me that even though mom has been gone some four months now, and dad over a year, there will always come a day that will remind me of some of the things I loved about them, or drove me nuts about them, and today it was all because of the thought of a greasy, sweety, ball of dough.
That’s it for this one!
I’m The Dude on the Right!! L8R!!!