Fat Thursday

"Tlusty Czwartek" (fat Thursday) is celebrated in Poland on the last Thursday before Lent - January 31 this year. We are lucky Lent comes early so we get to experience how the Poles celebrate another holiday. Though we'll be gone before Easter, I'm hoping to see some of the preparation once the Christmas decorations are taken down (which should happen this week-end). The main focus of Fat Thursday seems to be consuming piles of paczki: what we would call jelly-filled doughnuts. I thought the traditional filling was prune, but all the paczki we've had since coming to Poland (they do have them the rest of the year, just not in such large quantities), have been filled with rose jelly! The paczkek was good, but I scraped out the rose jelly.....