Paczki Day(s) in Chicago

Sorry, blog. I abandoned you last year while I was off to other projects. But I'm back now, and what do you think has prompted the return? Donuts.

Or paczki (POANCH-kee), to be precise. They're the sugar-coated, jelly-filled Polish pastries that have become a much-gobbled, pre-Lent tradition.

Paczki are denser and eggier than typical donuts, and their deep-fried goodness has spawned an eponymous holiday. Paczki Day is celebrated the Thursday before Lent in Poland. The custom blended with local Mardi Gras traditions when it came to the US, and immigrants began marking it on Fat Tuesday.

In Chicago, which has one of the world's largest Polish populations, we honor both days. This means we munch paczki - in all of their cherry, strawberry, apricot, prune, custard, chocolate and raspberry-plumped incarnations - from Thursday through Tuesday. And then Lent begins, when many folks give up such sweet indulgences.

Top 3 bakeries to get sugarcoat your face?

* Delightful Pastries: When you dream of paczki, it is Delightful's pillowy dough-balls that pop up. Delightful will bake 20,000 paczki for the six-day "season," and they'll bake many of those with booze. The joy of chasing a whiskey-and-chocolate-custard donut with a vanilla bean-vodka donut cannot be overstated.

* Bennison's Bakery: Evanston's popular pastry shop makes a mean enough paczki that contestants want to shove trays of them down their gob for the Annual Paczki Eating Contest. Last year's champions look a little woozy in this video, but hey, they won $300.

* Bridgeport Bakery: The South Side stalwart is not kidding around, with heaps of cheesy, creamy, fruity paczki options for a butt-cheap 95¢ each.

Click here for a map of more places to buy paczki around Chicago.

Chicago Cheap Eats: New App

Hungry? Broke? The new app, Chicago Cheap Eats, can fix the problem. It'll point you to the city's best donuts, haute dogs, tortas, masala dosas, deep-dish pizzas and much more to stuff your face, typically for under $10.

Yours truly wrote the app. It's available for the iPhone/iPod Touch. Click here to go to the iTunes store, where 99 cents gets you 70+ restaurants of bargain-priced foodie goodness.

The company - Sutro Media - offers other swell travel apps, too, including the low-down on Boston (by Kim Grant) and Las Vegas (by Sara Benson).

Donut Diaries, Entry #2

"Donuts return the magic of your childhood and take away the disappointment of your adulthood," said baker Kirsten Anderson in a recent Sun Times article.

True, we thought, and after a failed attempt to get Cubs tickets on the first day of sales, we decided to put Ms. Anderson's words to the test. Could her $3 mint chocolate donut cure our Cubbie blues?

Anderson crafts her wares with soy vegetable oil, forgoes eggs and butter, and sweetens with cane juice. Quirky flavors include pistachio with cardamom and lavender, orange spice with nutmeg and clove, and the aforementioned mint chocolate (with real sprigs of mint baked on top). Anderson hand rolls each cakey treat, so output is limited - only seven dozen donuts per week, popped out of the fryer on Fridays. Grab 'em at Bite Cafe's counter.

Is it worth it, you ask? After all, three bucks equals three Dunkin Donut chocolate kremes or two packs of Dolly Madison Gems. Yes, and no. Yes for the flavorgasm and lack stomach ache/sugar crash afterward. No, because aren't cheap aches and pains part of the defining donut experience?

Donut Diaries, Entry #1

Is it our imagination, or do donuts taste better when served to customers on a lazy susan from behind bulletproof glass?

Clearly, people kill for the sinkers at Dat Donut (8249 S Cottage Grove Ave). Which is understandable. Take Dat's custard donut, with its dense, eggy filling and thick, powdered-sugar exterior. It's so sublimely doughy it's like a pillow one could nap upon for epochs. Conversely, the caramel frosted donut is light as air, smothered in finger-lickin' icing that melts over the sides.

Chocolate long johns, apple fritters, Boston cream - the list goes on for the hand-cut yeast bombs at this shop on Chicago's far South Side. But the hubcap-sized Big Dat remains the sweet to beat. Even behind thick glass, under fluorescent light, its glaze glimmers and dazzles.

Is it worth the possible gunshot wound and/or the onset of diabetes to obtain its glazed goodness?

"Yeh," the counter girl says, and she spins out a half dozen on the lazy susan that prove it.