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Happy Fat Tuesday! This past weekend I visited one of my favorite U.S. cities, New Orleans, for the start of the Mardi Gras celebrations. If you want to celebrate and are unable to make the trip to the Big Easy, the internet has some great ways to make it feel like you are there.

Throw on some party beads and watch the parades!
Click here for a live webcam of various shots of New Orleans, as well as the parades broadcasted live. There is also a live blog that will update you on the happenings of the day.

Bon Apetite! Mardi Gras is not complete without the delicious cuisine that New Orleans has to offer. My top favorites:

Café Du Monde's café Au Lait and beignets.

You can buy beignet mix and a can of coffee on their website.

Central Grocery muffaletta.

A typical muffuletta consists of one muffuletta loaf, split horizontally. The loaf is then covered with a marinated olive salad, then layers of capicola, salami, mortadella, emmentaler, and provolone. Click here for a fellow bloggers recipe.

Tropical Isle Hand Grenades. Known as "New Orleans' Most Powerful Drink," the cocktail has a sweet melon taste, is colored light-green, and comes in a plastic half-yard glass shaped like a hand grenade at the bottom, with small plastic grenades inside the container. The home mix can be purchased from their website.

And of course, no Mardi Gras is complete without king cake. A Lousiana-style king cake is a cinnamon-roll like cake inside with sugary icing with traditional Mardi Gras colored (green, yellow, purple) sprinkles on the outside. The cakes have a small plastic baby trinket inside, and the person who gets the piece of cake with it is King or Queen for the day. The top 15 places to order king cakes can be found here, although Party Palace is my personal favorite.

For more information on visiting New Orleans, visit www.NewOrleans.travel