Category: Food & Drink

Restaurant Foods We Love

It can be a chain, a mom and pop, or a local legend-there’s enough variety in restaurant choices to find favorites nearly everywhere! Here’s a quick update of some our recent encounters that we loved enough to recommend. First, if you find yourself …

It can be a chain, a mom and pop, or a local legend–there’s enough variety in restaurant choices to find favorites nearly everywhere! Here’s a quick update of some our recent encounters that we loved enough to recommend.

First, if you find yourself in Galveston, Texas, visit Gaido’s Restaurant along the seawall. We have this restaurant on repeat, and always get some version of their crab-stuffed shrimp.

Indulge in an appetizer from Gaido’s, too, like the breaded onion rings, above.

We mentioned chain restaurants, so First Watch gives you an opportunity to find one of the more than 500 locations across 29 states. We love their seasonal menu items, and this delicious sugar-rimmed drink was from their Fall line-up.

While Gaido’s is a local institution, Mama’s on the Hill, in St. Louis, Missouri, is all that and more to the people of St. Louis. It’s a family-owned restaurant that serves great pasta in an area where great Italian food is supreme. Try their Tortellini a la Pappa, with prosciutto and a creamy garlic Parmesan sauce.

Finally, we come to a homegrown favorite and a twist on avocado toast, found at JW’s Kitchen in Southwest Missouri. It’s in a trendy area called Farmer’s Park, and it lives up to the promise with a fresh version of Neighbor’s Mill bakery’s multi-grain bread, topped with pickled onions, egg, radishes, and lots more. Great for brunch or any time of day, particularly when paired with one of their fresh juices, like the combo of beet, cranberry, and more pictured in the background.

Restaurants are doing one of three things right now: innovating, recovering, or closing. Go support your local favorites and prevent that last from happening!

What is Paczki Day? The Fat Tuesday tradition, explained

It’s Paczki Day!

Editor’s note: This story was originally published in 2020.

Welcome to FTW Explains: A guide to catching up on and better understanding stuff going on in the world. You may have heard it’s Paczki Day and are wondering what that’s all about. We’re here to help.

It’s Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday or Shrove Tuesday, and you may have heard some people talking about paczki or Paczki Day as well and have no idea what they’re talking about. That’s OK because we’re here to explain.

There are countless ways people celebrate Fat Tuesday, the day before the Christian holy day of Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent. And this is just one more.

Although Paczki Day is a particularly big deal in the Midwest, it’s certainly not exclusive to that area of the U.S. So let’s break down the basics.

What is are paczki?

RICHARD LEE/Detroit Free Press/USA TODAY Network

A paczek is a Polish-style fried pastry bun made with butter, eggs and sugar and filled with fruit or jelly. The plural of paczek is paczki — although it’s common for people to throw an S on the end of that.

As the Detroit Free Press noted a few years ago, traditional paczki are prune-filled, but nowadays, there are a wide variety of fruit or custard fillings. They can also have a powder, glaze or sometimes chocolate finish.

How do you pronounce paczki or paczek?

One Polish-style pastry, paczek, is pronounced poon-check, while the plural, paczki, is pronounced poonch-key.

What do paczki taste like?

They’re a delightfully sublime slice of heaven that melt in your mouth with each exceptionally high-caloric bite. It’s richer, and far better, than a typical doughnut and only comes in a spherical shape. And despite being fairly heavy — although the really good ones don’t often taste like it — they’re not greasy, thanks to a small amount of grain alcohol added to the dough, which, when it evaporates, prevents the dough from absorbing oil.

So what exactly is Paczki Day then?

It’s along the same lines of Fat Tuesday, or the last day to splurge on sweets or rich food before fasting during the Lenten, the six weeks that precede Easter on the Christian calendar. Leading up to Lent, indulging with paczki has been a tradition in Europe dating back at least to the Middle Ages, the Detroit Free Press noted. But, of course, traditions and recipes have evolved in the U.S.

However, Paczki Day wasn’t always celebrated on the same day as Mardi Gras. As the Polish American Journal explains:

While the practice of Pączki Day is traditionally observed the day before Ash Wednesday in the United States, in Poland, pączki sales are the highest on Tlusty Czwartek, or “Fat Thursday.” (The Thursday before Ash Wednesday). This day marks the start of the final week of the pre-Lenten celebrations.

Are they healthy?

Not even a little bit. One paczek can have more than 400 calories and 25 grams of fat. But that’s sticks to the theme of Fat Tuesday or Fat Thursday.

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Celebrate National Pancake Day with free IHOP pancakes on Tuesday, February 13 2024

Here’s how to get free pancakes today!

Did you know Tuesday, February 13 2024 is National Pancake Day?

I didn’t, but now I’m really glad I learned it. Because thanks to the good folks at IHOP (that’s the International House of Pancakes to you) are giving away pancakes on that day, and we all love free food, especially pancakes.

So how can you do it? We’re here to help.

Per the chain, on Tuesday, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., you can get a free short stack, one per guest. That’s three buttermilk pancakes, free, for dine-in-guests only. Also, you can pair the free pancakes with $1 donations to help support Feeding America.

That’s it! Go enjoy the day with some free pancakes!

The 2024 Super Bowl going to overtime means free Buffalo Wild Wings for America

FREE WINGS!!

Hey, guess what, America?

Thanks to the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers going to overtime in Super Bowl 58, that triggers a deal with Buffalo Wild Wings: If the big game went to OT, people could win FREE WINGS.

How does all that work? On February 26, 2024, from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. at a local Buffalo Wild Wings, you can get six free wings.

That’s it! Congratulations to you all! You get free wings! And you get free wings!

Here are the details, along with some people who are really, really, really excited for free food (I am too, don’t worry).

Super Bowl food deals 2024: 7 discounts and free food to get for the big game

Some Super Bowl food deals to take advantage of on Sunday.

IT’S THE SUPER BOWL! The annual meeting of the AFC and NFC champions in a winner-take-all game with an incredible halftime show is finally here, with the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers facing off on Sunday evening in Las Vegas.

It’s also a day in which everyone gets a lot of food to eat while they watch, including at parties. And if you’re looking for free food or discounts, you’ve come to the right place — there are some deals to take advantage of.

So here they are, in no particular order, as we all get ready for the big game:

Celebrate National Pizza Day 2024 with 6 deals on Friday, February 9

Get some free pizza and discounts on National Pizza Day 2024.

Happy 2024 National Pizza Day to all who celebrate — and really, shouldn’t we all celebrate ice cream every day, especially on Friday, February 9?

Why is February 9 National Pizza Day? That’s not what we’re here to answer. You’re here to find out about free or discounted pizza, and we want to get to that as fast as possible so the cheese doesn’t get all cold and congealed.

So let’s stop writing about pizza and get to the important stuff here: A partial list of joints that we’ve found who will give something away or sell you pizza for less than the usual price:

What are America’s most popular beers to fill your 2024 Super Bowl party lineup?

Make sure you load up on local beers, but if you want something both a) available and b) inoffensive, we’ve got you covered.

Throwing a good Super Bowl party isn’t just about having a properly massive television on which to watch the game. It’s about creating an environment from which you can absorb and process whatever nonsense Tony Romo spews toward the screen at the intersection of a quarterback’s throwing motion and his personal life.

The strongest among us can shake this off. The rest of us can find solace in malt, hops, yeast and water.

The Super Bowl provides a rare opportunity where Sunday night drinking isn’t just tolerated, but mostly encouraged. But putting together a beer lineup for your party can be an intimidating task given the vast array of choices on stocked shelves across the country.

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And while the most popular beers in the U.S. aren’t necessarily the ones I’d pick, they’re a good barometer for a lowest common denominator brew that will keep the widest swath of guests happy. In order to figure out which beers fit that bill, I used YouGov’s consumer awareness index, which plots what percentage of poll respondents have heard of a certain beer and what percentage actively like said beer.

Here are the results.

How to build the perfect beer lineup for your 2024 Super Bowl party

How to build the perfect beer lineup for your 2024 Super Bowl party

Start with a big, popular lager. Then branch out from there — into IPAs and, yep, hard seltzers and canned cocktails.

Creating a proper Super Bowl viewing party isn’t just a matter of getting a properly enormous television to broadcast Tony Romo’s nonsensical rants in high definition. It’s also about creating a nurturing environment from which to absorb Romo’s garbage and the possibility of a big game blowout.

And, in one of the few cases it’s not only tolerated but expected on a Sunday evening, that involves beer.

Finding the right beers can be a daunting task, especially if you live in a place where the liquor lineups take up roughly the same square footage of a standard grocery store. And since I happen to live in one of these places, I’m gonna toss in my Wisconsin-specific recommendations alongside the brews you can find just about anywhere in the U.S.

Here’s where you should start — and where you should finish — to create a crowd-pleasing Super Bowl 58 beer lineup.

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