By 3 in the afternoon, both the A and B teams were resting. The men smoked cigars and drank beer in the gazebo, the women sat around the covered lanai with glasses of red wine listening to Frank DeLima on the stereo. The pool table was stacked with bags and bags of malassadas. The dove that had been landing on people's heads all morning was back, landing on people's heads.

Shrove Tuesday, or Fat Tuesday, the day before Lent begins, is in many cultures a time to use up the rich food — things like lard and sugar — before the 40 days of fasting. In Hawai'i, Portuguese families who worked on the plantations made malassadas on Fat Tuesday.

Henriette Valdez has been doing her part to preserve the tradition of Malassada Day for the last 50 years.

Henriette and husband Larry host the party at their Kailua home. Siblings, cousins, neighbors, classmates from high school — it's a big crowd that waxes and wanes throughout the day. They start out with 60 pounds of flour, which equals about 1,200 malassadas. They start cracking eggs after all the malassada makers have been fed a hearty breakfast of Portuguese sausage, eggs and rice. Henriette's family malassada recipe includes pumpkin and riced potato and the strict requirement that all mixing must be done by hand.

That work is left to the men, whose efforts are rewarded with a lunch of Portuguese bean soup followed by beer, cigars and general tomfoolery under the gazebo.

These malassadas are different from Leonard's or Champion's or Punahou Carnival's. For starters, they have a hole in the middle. Henriette doesn't approve of the B team's holes. Too uneven. "Larry was on the B team," she said with mock disdain.

The other big difference — these malassadas are not rolled in sugar. Instead, there's a lemon-flavored sugar glaze that's Henriette's family tradition.

After the cooking and the laughing and the eating, there's more cooking, laughing and eating. Dinner is vinha dohls pork and potatoes, cod fish casserole and rainbow Jell-o for dessert. Plus all the malassadas anyone could want.

So what does it cost to buy all the ingredients, feed all the malassada makers, buy the beer for the gazebo gang? Larry smiles his Larry smile and sweeps his hand wide to include all the friends, relatives, the overly friendly dove and various hangers-on who came to eat and laugh and eat some more. "You can't put a price on love," he says dramatically. And then everyone laughs.

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.