Fried & Fabulous

Today is National Donut Day. Tomorrow is the Tour de Wing.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Isn’t every day National Donut Day? That’s like trying to say just one day a year is dedicated to hamburgers, when we eat hamburgers all the time. When the ad says, “America runs on Dunkin” the next word that goes unsaid is “donuts.”

Of course, the chain is a national disgrace and a crime against both food and coffee, but we don’t need to get into that right now.

Fortunately, we have some great independent donut shops, including Cider Belly which will be distributing free doughnuts from the doughnut-mobile in honor of today’s holiday, if you are lucky enough to find it out and about. They will be posting clues on Instagram, so happy hunting.

Here’s the hard part.

Despite my deep love for fried foods, I need to limit my intake of them. Somehow my diet spun a bit out of control. I think it may have had something to do with that time a couple months ago when two rogue world leaders were threatening each other with nuclear annihilation.

Today, that means sitting out of National Donut Day.

The wing tour tomorrow will be my fried food for the week. Probably it should be my fried food for the month, but I don’t have nearly that level of self control.

Just last night I was told of a pizza place in Cohoes that not only puts meatballs and chicken parm in between halves of a garlic knot for “Garlic Parm Sliders” but they also have pizza fritta. For the uninitiated, that’s fried dough dusted with powdered sugar. But I love it. My plan is to go there and check it out later this month with some Yelp friends.

What I do not love are deep fried foods that don’t have the hot and crispy payoff of their marvelous cooking technique. So hopefully, the places we visit for the wing tour tomorrow will be up to snuff.

The weather will be warm, but cloudy. There isn’t expected to be any rain. So it sounds like the perfect day to walk around and try to undo all the harm of an afternoon spent eating wings.

For those who want to join, there’s still space available. Check out all the details here, and let me know if you plan to come. And if you want to celebrate donuts today and eat wings tomorrow, you should do it. You do you. I won’t judge.