Let's Party!

Its Mardi Gras today - which is French for "Fat Tuesday" and it is supposed to be the last day of festivity before Lent.

You all probably know this already, but I only just googled it last night :-)  Apparantly you are supposed to partake of a big fatty meal on Fat Tuesday, hence the name I guess.

So, while I am not planning on eating the traditional fatty meal, neither am I participating in Lent,  nevertheless, in the spirit of the day I will be taking out my "beads" and making myself a cocktail of some sort, and a New Orleans inspired dinner of Cajun shrimp with rice and kale and having my own Mardi Gras party - for one.

I wanted to do collard greens but I don't know how to cook them the right way and did not want to bother with ham hocks, and slow cookers, etc. I try to keep my cooking to be no more than 30 min, so I cannot be bothered with too much fuss. So, kale it is, although cleaning it will probably take me 30 min!

Off I go --- will blog how it all turned out later.

Updated:

Dinner has been cooked and eaten and the kitchen mess cleaned up. It came out quite good, and looked exactly like the photo  http://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/True-Shrimp-Creole
The next time I shall add some cayenne pepper to make it spicier but I purposely kept it bit lower key today.  I like to listen to an "oldies" music station on while cooking. So today while I was making the shrimp, Elvis's "King Creole" song came on -- what a coincidence!

And no, I am not from New Orleans.  Although I have visited once and the food is awesome - even better than I had imagined. I could totally live there though :-)

Oh and the "beads" I got at a restaurant in Palo Alto, CA (of all places!) where we had gone for a business dinner.  They had them on the table for everyone to wear and take home -- no sure why. May be it was in Feb.