31 Awesome Things in 31 Days: Thing #30—Celebrate Donut Day (belatedly)

The book David checked out from the library from which we took our donut-making recipe. These two dudes are definitely way skinnier than I would expect them to be after reading their little narrative blurbs about how much they love to eat everything in this book (and for breakfast). Their shirts are untucked, but still. (Furthermore, doesn't the guy on the left look like a poor man's Ben Affleck undercover with a Magnum PI stache?)

We originally planned to make homemade donuts for Donut Day last Friday, but that day suddenly got super booked with other Awesome Things (see Thing #28). Instead, we celebrated the day belatedly on a Sunday late afternoon (and continued celebrating well into today with delicious day-olders).

We were also excited to have an excuse to use the biscuit cutter that Dave's mom sent us home with two Houston trips ago. (The donut holes were made using a sanitized lid from our dry-erase board cleaner.)

Deep fryin' some good ole' Texas donuts. David got me a candy thermometer for the occasion (which is nice, because I'm always having to guess temperatures when I fry tonkatsu, so now I can tackle that Japanese dish with more confidence). 

The three dippin' sauces: vanilla frosting (turned into more of a glaze), chocolate frosting, and sugar-cinnamon mix.

Naked freshly baked donuts.

One chocolate and one vanilla glaze. Yes, ma'am.

Can you taste it, folks? Can you? Because it was DELICIOUS. 

A poorly taken picture of some delightful little donut holes.

Uh...the donuts might have been for dinner, so I tried to balance ourselves out by making Dave and Hollie drink a smoothie composed literally 70% of straight pureed frozen strawberries. I think we drank a whole carton of strawberries. Donut day comes but once a year, doo-dah! Doo-dah!

And that's how we ate way too many donuts in two days and why someone should probably come lecture us about feeding donuts to a 19-month-old for dinner. Next time we'll have to have some jimmies on hand to make our donuts more festive. We decided it might be a fun Grover family tradition to make homemade donuts after the first snow each year, so we can dip them in hot chocolate. Nice, right?

I should also mention that David has been avidly reading Michael Moss's Sugar, Salt, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, which is a terrifying book about how America has gotten duped into eating sheer garbage cleverly designed to look like foods we should feed ourselves and our children. Every time we go to the supermarket together, I hear Dave muttering under his breath as we walk through the aisles of canned and boxed goods, "Sugar....salt....fat....sugar....salt....fat...bliss point...sugar....salt...." It reminds me of when he read Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'ubervilles when all he would do was walk around house sighing, "Tess......oh, Tess......poor Tess......."

The only plus we have for the above concoctions of sugar and fat is that at least it was all homemade. Still, we're back on our flexitarian diet this week (two vegetarian meals a day and one omnivorous dish if we feel like it). And we've been pretty good with our anti-processed-food diet, save for Hollie's goldfish fixation. Hey, what am I justifying myself to you for? Quit judging me and be jealous of our donuts!

And that's how we did Thing #30: Celebrating a belated donut day with homemade donuts, baby. ACCOMPLISHED.