Shopping: Metropolitan Market is picking up steam and becoming a hip place for the mundane task of grocery shopping. You can tell these folks have a genuine love of food and the desire to help you become your foodie best. This place inspires your culinary skills.

Tony "the Paczkinator" Manipon from the Queen Anne Metropolitan Market won the paczki-eating contest by consuming 5 and two-thirds of the polish pastries in three minutes yesterday (Fat Tuesday.)

That may be a new record; last year no one ate more than five.

You should probably not try this at home, but if you insist, all Metropolitan Market stores will be selling paczki through Feb. 26.

Metropolitan Market has brought Paczki to the Northwest and celebrated Fat Tuesday with a Paczki-eating contest yesterday.

This decadent treat, pronounced Poonch-Key, is a deep-fried, often sugar-dusted pastry filled in the center with a fruit or crème filling.

Metropolitan Market employees competed at the Admiral store to see who could eat the most Paczki in a 3 minute period. This year’s winner was Tony Manipon from Queen Anne Metropolitan Market, who ate 5 2/3 Paczki in 3 minutes!

Making you hungry? Paczki will be available at Metropolitan Market through Feb. 26.

IT'S FAT TUESDAY, BABY AND THE BUZZ in Uptown that's been buiding for weeks is all about the Paczki. Valley Street is a veritable Paczkipalooza as we anxiously await today's Paczki Challenge - a Paczki eating contest hosted by local grocer Metropolitan Market at its Admiral (West Seattle) location.

How did the BUZZ get started? My neighbor Elizabeth's investigative prowess and her proud Polish heritage helped track down the Paczki (pronounced "Poonch-Key). Thanks to her WORD, Valley Street friends can't get enough of this wonderful Old World pastry.

A News Tribune field trip to Metropolitan Market in Proctor this week yielded an overload of carb finds. Our purchases included a Desserted Island pie, made by the Seattle Pie Company, which is opening the Old Town Pie Shop in March. We also popped by Met Market’s new gelato counter for a pint of pistachio flavored gelato. And our final purchase was a half dozen paczki – a thick, chewy, filled doughnut that is a Fat Tuesday tradition (emphasis on the Fat), and available in the store only for a short time.

Yesterday, hours from an impending cholesterol test, I found myself in front of the paczki (pronounced poonch-key or punchkey) at the newly-refurbed Uptown Met Market.

People unfairly call them Polish donuts; they're actually much richer, filled with jam and made from an eggy dough-- or so I've heard. I wouldn't know from paczki, but employees of the store are about to find out big-time.

The Paczki Challenge on (Fat) Tuesday, February 16 is the Olympics of powdered sugar-dusted pastry; Contestants representing each Met Market store location (including Uptown and QA; Go team!) eat as many of the fried confections as they can in three minutes. It all goes down at 11 a.m. at the Admiral store. Apparently, last year no one ate more than five.

There will be complimentary paczki and coffee for the public to enjoy at their leisure. Filling flavors include chocolate custard, vanilla custard, lemon, or raspberry.

Maybe they'll let me try one of each. I've never had paczki, and now I've got a whole five years until my next cholesterol test.

If you popped into Metropolitan Market yesterday morning, you may have noticed a new selection of perfectly round, glazed and filled doughnuts, neatly arranged in the bakery case. If you passed them up only to return later to pick up a few, as I did, you’d have been disappointed. They had sold out hours earlier.

Such is the power of paczki.

Paczki (pronounced “pooch-key”) are Polish glazed and filled doughnuts that date back to the Middle Ages. Traditionally, they created a way for households to use up the sugar and fat in their cupboards before Lent, explains William Leaman, head baker and owner of West Seattle’s Bakery Nouveau. They also offered a way for bakeries to use up their candied fruits left over from Christmas baking. Chef Leaman’s recipe was passed down to him from a chef who made paczki from a family recipe that dated back to the 1930s.

Paczki dough is much richer than a typical doughnut, and Bakery Nouveau’s version contains more egg yolks, more sugar, plus lots of candied orange peel. Each paczki is filled with the Bakery’s own luscious crémeux custard, be it chocolate or lemon, strawberry or raspberry, and then thickly glazed or covered in powdered sugar.

While paczki are well known in the Midwest, where people buy dozens at a time to share, they only arrived in Seattle last year. Find them now at Bakery Nouveau and Metropolitan Market, but don’t tarry. They sell out in a flash, and they’re here for a limited time only.

As if Valentine’s Day – dubbed “V-Day” by those unimpressed by either its sucrose-saturated, schmoopy, and saccharine nature, its commercialized evolution, or both – isn’t enough reason to LOVE (or despise) February, then what about the “Carnivalrous” Mardi Gras (that’s Fat Tuesday in the English language, or Shrove Tuesday and/or Pancake Tuesday in England and throughout the Commonwealth countries) to be held on February 16th this year?

Winter is behind us (and hopefully our behinds are not larger) while spring is on the way; it’s time to celebrate, no? Thus February is a perfect hedonist’s month-long holiday. Until the Christian Lent, that is. So, before the hard times come, its time for sugar, lard, eggs, debauchery, and general revelry.

These are doughnuts ... kicked up a notch.