Café du Monde beignets

It's Fat Tuesday, the traditional time to stuff your pie-holes with things made of egg and sugar and lard, the things that you cannot have for forty days. But that's traditional European Catholic and we're Americans so we cannot be bossed around by those arcane rules.

While we can eat all the doughnuts we like any time that wish.

Everyone drives me nuts.

The guy at Café du Monde drives me nuts for his careless non caring attitude. The husband and wife drive me nuts because the Café du Monde box of beignet mix is a hoax. And the Irish woman who talks funny drives me nuts because all cooks from those islands of Great Britain and Ireland cannot help from saying "lovely" half a dozen times whenever they talk about food. And that proves they are mob mentality. I heard 5 "lovelies." But who's counting?

It's a yeast dough with egg, milk, sugar, and fat, that is fried in oil. Beignet means fritter in English. They were originally made from pâte à choux dough, that is boiled milk with flour stirred into it and cooked stovetop before eggs beaten in. They puff up hollow when baked or deep-fried leaving room to squirt filling into, usually a fruit mixture or crème anglaise or lemon custard. Cream puffs.

But all that's too much. Nowadays they are doughnuts.

Two related videos follow.

You can buy 10 Lbs. of flour for the price of this mix.

Baking powder and baking soda and/or yeast.

Come on. Which is it? Chemical leaven or yeast? That's rather important to know. Don't you think? This is why I go nuts all the time. 

It's not that lovely, lovely, lovely, lovey, lovely. It's a cheap ass doughnut. The cheapest most slip-shoddiest possible. 

There are a ton of these beignet videos. They all say the same thing 'cept different. 

One guy uses three bowls and insists cotton seed oil is required.  The Irish woman proofs her yeast in a measuring cup, mixes ingredients in her bowl, and proofs her dough in the same bowl she mixed things. Like I do.

Some deep-fry others bake. Some are vegetarian. Every type of fat is used, lard, butter, solid vegetable, coconut oil, everything imaginable. 

As you know, these doughnuts treated as food combined with sedentary lifestyles are the reasons why people are fat. 

I made them a couple of times. Wanna see em? They belong in a beignet museum.

I get a bit ill just looking at them again.

Here are both of them, banana and lemon. 

I must now pray forgiveness.

Lord, please forgive me for contributing to the delinquency of innocents down here. Thank you. Amen.