Poutine Done Right

INGRID THOFT

Last week I arrived in Montreal a poutine skeptic.  I'd had it before, the Canadian comfort food of french fries topped with gravy and cheese curds.  My first and only experience with the dish was in Vancouver, which seemed like a reasonable place to try it.  I wasn't wowed by the concoction, but my niece in Montreal insisted that I hadn't had good poutine, and she knew just the place to remedy that.

At Dirty Dogs, the lighting was low and the menu extensive.  French fries, gravy, and cheese curds were just the bases of the poutines on offer.  My niece opted for the Soprano:  bruschetta, bacon, mozzarella, and pesto.  My mom—always up for an adventure, culinary or otherwise—opted for the Eastwood.  It was topped with caramelized onions, barbecue sauce, cheddar cheese, monterey jack cheese, and bacon.  The Dirty Sanchez featured crushed corn tortillas, four cheese sauce, sour cream, salsa fresco and green onions.  I decided to go all in or whole hog as it were:  Le Pig Mac was a heaping bowl of the french fries, gravy, and cheese curd base  topped with mac n' cheese, pulled pork, barbecue sauce, and caramelized onions.

It was very dark in Dirty Dogs, hence the poor photo

Did I lose you?  Probably.  You're probably thinking that the combinations I've described sound disgusting and weird.  I thought the same thing, but I put my hesitation aside and was rewarded for it.  It was delicious.  We sampled one another's, all of which were great, but I have to say that my Le Pig Mac was so tasty, I had to stop myself from eating the whole thing.  Sure, my arteries had hardened and I'd ingested enough calories to fuel a Canadian hockey team, but it tasted fantastic!  This weird, messy heap of food was just the ticket for a cold Montreal night.

My mom, of course, wanted to learn about the origins of the dish, but an online search netted little information.  The best we could find is that in 1957, a truck driver in Quebec asked that cheese be sprinkled on his french fries, and a tradition was born.  It seems a bit flimsy to me, so maybe some of you Canadian readers could enlighten us?

Lest you think that all the food in Montreal falls into the drunk or hangover category, I can assure you that we had many delicious meals with nary a cheese curd in sight.  At a Spanish restaurant, I had a bowl of bright orange carrot cumin soup that was creamy and flavorful.  A plate of jet black squid ink pasta at the art museum was delicious as was the salmon tartare.  Before heading across the border, we tucked into eggs benedict that was as beautiful as it was tasty.

I would return to Montreal in a heartbeat.  It's a beautiful city with friendly people, amazing street art and fabulous food.  And I would definitely make a return visit to Dirty Dogs.  I need to try Le Angry Goat (roasted red pepper, arugula, baby spinach, goat cheese, pesto, and balsamic glaze)!

Have you tried poutine?  Or is there another dish that made you a believer, despite your reservations?

Louise Penny Visits Jungle Reds

RHYS: Today I'm delighted to bring as my guest to Jungle Red Writers a writer I admire and a friend I cherish, Louise Penny. Louise burst onto the mystery scene only a two or three years ago with her mysteries set in small town Quebec. She won the debut Dagger in UK and the Dilys, Anthony and Macavity in the States. She has won the Agatha two years in a row. Her books have become instant bestsellers. Louise and I were together over the weekend at the Bloody Words conference in Ottawa, Canada and had a few minutes to chat.
So welcome Louise. Thank you for taking the time to answer some questions. You made an instant impact on the mystery scene with a series that is neither sensational nor violent, but instead portrays the gentle and safe world of rural Canada. How do you explain your success?

LOUISE: You're right, Rhys. My books are about decency and kindness. I wanted to create a village that felt like home, where weary readers could escape from a world not always kind, not always as caring and gentle as we'd like. John Milton wrote that sometimes we have to sift through evil to find good. That's what the books do. They find, at their core, good.

RHYS: Your hero, Inspector Gamache, is a far cry from the angst-ridden heroes of hardboiled novels. He is decent human being, at peace with himself. Where did he come from?

LOUISE: I think you've hit it bang on. A decent hero, with integrety and goodness and a secure environment. Peace. Internal and external. I know that's what I long for. And when I read I don't want to go to a place worse than my real world. I want to escape. Three Pines and Gamache gives people that.
But this isn't a fairy tale. The reason I think I can conjure Three Pines so convincingly - and Armand Gamache - is because I know both exist. Goodness exists. Decency, love, friendship exist. This is, in fact, a lovely world we live in. There's reason for hope.
In creating CI Gamache I made a very selfish decision. I wanted someone I wouldn't tire of in a year or two. He needed to have qualities not just quirks. And the only way I felt I could be assured of enjoying his company was to make him someone I would marry. So I make him a happy man, at peace with himself and his world. A man who loves and is loved. I had to make him French because it was unlikely an Anglo would hold that rank in the Surete, and I wanted to firmly establish the French face and voice of Quebec.

RHYS: He is French Canadian and you are not. How did you manage to get into the mind-set of a French-speaking man?

LOUISE: I'm not sure how well I've captured the mind of a francophone man. I pretty much just wrote my husband Michael - and made him French.

RHYS: So what is next for Gamache and Three Pines?

LOUISE: Well, the fifth Gamache book is coming out in October. It's called The Brutal Telling.

RHYS: What little tidbit can you share with us--something that people might not know about you? What are your dreams and your fears?

LOUISE: Well, you might not know that I'm a saint! Though I'd have hoped you could tell without my having to actually say anything, Rhys! I sent 50 dollars to the Universal Life Church back in the mid-80's and they declared me a saint. My miracle is getting published.
I have two great fears - heights and losing Michael.
Not perhaps surprisingly the things I love most are solid ground, and Michael.
My childhood fantasy was for my real mother - the Queen - to come and get me from my suburban hell. Apparently if she had I'd have met my sister Rhys, also raised by commoners! (comment by Rhys--Louise and I discovered during an interview once that we had both had childhood fantasies about being royal. Obviously sisters separated at birth!)
I think perhaps the only other thing that informs my life is astonishment and gratitude. How lucky I am!
Thank you for this, Rhys!

RHYS: We thank YOU, Louise. We hope that Gamache will continue to provide us with that safe haven for many years to come.

On vacations

No man needs a vacation so much as the person who has just had one. ~Elbert Hubbard

JAN: It's true, I just came home from a fabulous vacation in France, biking through vineyards, meeting up with old friends, and going to a great lecture on why the French are so obsessed with Sarkozy. But there's really nothing all that funny or interesting about someone else's fabulous vacation. Much more interesting is someone's really bad vacation.

The worst was a trip to Nova Scotia I took almost thirty years ago with my now husband, then boyfriend, Bill. We took a boat from Portland that had a casino on it, except we weren't allowed to go into the casino because I wasn't 21 years old yet. Unable to afford a berth, we tried to sleep outside on the deck, only the casino was really loud and went all night. But that wasn't the worst part. Or even that Bill got pickpocketed a few days later on the bus to Digby. The worst part was the bed and breakfast we stayed in while we waited for his father to wire us money.

It was a Victorian house, run by two old women, neither of which was very welcoming.(Maybe because I wasn't wearing a wedding band?) The disapproval we felt, combined with the creakiness of the old house and perhaps the trauma of having been pickpocketed, worked some pretty bad magic. I woke up at four o'clock in the morning by voices I was sure were in our room. I didn't actually see ghosts, but I was convinced I could feel them. I swear, it was the only time in my life I ever alleged a supernatural experience, and perhaps the only time in our entire relationship, Bill didn't make fun of me. He didn't even ask me if I was delirous. He got up and started packing. We wandered around the town until our Western Union wire came through and we returned to the bed and breakfast only to pay our bill. We'd been planning to go to Halifax, but instead, cut our vacation short and went straight home.

I still get the creeps thinking about it. So I want to know, what was your absolute worst vacation?

RO: I took that same ferry one year and it was the only time I ever got seasick - not fun. But the rest of the trip was wonderful so that doesn't count. I've had trips where things went wrong, but they've turned into some of my best memories so this is harder than it sounds. My husband and I went on a Habitat trip to Yunnan Province in China. We treated ourselves to a few days in Hong Kong before the rest of the team arrived, and because a good friend of ours is a travel writer we had a fabulous suite overlooking the harbor - the bathroom had a telescope in it, you get the picture. I kept referring to it as the Michael Douglas suite for some reason.

Then we left for a small village in Yunnan and a two story guest house with one pit toilet, and our own solar showers (plastic bags you fill with water and hope that the sun warms.) The first three days were fine, then there was a freak snowstorm and we had no power and no way out. We ate noodles for 4 days. People were so cold they duct-taped their (cracked) windows shut. I didn't take my Knicks stocking cap off the entire time - of course only one guy showered (showoff.)Camera batteries and Ipods died, and there was nothing to do except stroll up and down the strip that was the town. But it wasn't all bad, the street was lined with snowmen (apparently it wasn't such a freak occurence, just for the time of year that we were there.) And we dramatically altered the town's economy by buying pencils, erasers, matches, playing cards and pin cushions, the few items stocked in the village.

ROBERTA: I was newly married with two new stepchildren when my husband suggested we join his parents and other relatives on a fishing trip to Quebec. Somehow my father got roped in too. Jan, the only French involved was when we stopped for groceries and couldn't figure out what to do with the plastic bag of milk.

"Mais le lait, c'est dans un sac!" my husband exclaimed. But the milk, it's in a bag...The store owners must have thought it took very little to entertain us!

All told we drove 18 hours with a minivan full of squabbling children, then got in a motorboat to be taken out to our island and dropped off. There was nothing there except a couple of cabins and some boats for fishing. But the fishing was good only at dusk and dawn. The rest of the days stretched endlessly...endlessly. My stepdaughter famously told my husband how she hated me because she was in charge before I came along. My father woke up one morning and famously asked:

"What day is it?"'

"Wednesday," I replied glumly.

"I was afraid of that," he said.

All said and done, we've probably told those stories more often than any others. And my stepdaughter is a lovely young lady who no longer hates me (nor I her) and I adore my in-laws, so all's well!

HALLIE: I thought I didn’t have any awful vacations, but Roberta’s island getaway reminded me of the trip my husband and I and our then 1-year-old daughter Naomi and 6-year-old Molly took to Cuttyhunk Island.

Cuttyhunk is a tiny island between New Bedford and Martha’s Vineyard that you can get to only by ferry (as in small boat, not car ferry). There was one little market where everything costs a fortune since it has to be boated out there. Which meant you had to bring EVERYTHING with you. For a week-long stay with two kids, that was a lot of stuff. When we packed up our yellow Ford Pinto wagon for the trip, we were astonished that everything fit. Between the boxes of Pampers, food for the week, beach toys, toilet paper, stroller, backpack baby carrier, and so on, we looked like a family of émigrés.

The crossing was rough. When Naomi wasn’t eating or throwing up, she cried. At Cuttyhunk, we got off the boat and paid a guy with a wheelbarrow to schlep our boxes and paraphernalia up the hill to the house. Finally we arrived, exhausted triumphant. Counted kids. All present. Counted boxes and equipment. All present. Counted suitcases. Zero.

All week we argued over whose fault it was. Had we left the suitcases in the car in the garage? On the ground outside the car in the garage? In the driveway? It never occurred to either of us that we’d (note my use of the term “we”) left the suitcase open on our bed at home. No wonder the car had packed so easily.

Turned out the only thing we really needed that we didn’t have were toothbrushes, and those we bought at the store. That week, we wore sheets and dish towels while the clothes we’d worn over were being washed or dried on the clothesline. The baby fared the best. After all, we’d brought diapers. But Molly still remembers how humiliated she felt swimming in the ocean in her underwear—fortunately they were Wonder Woman Under-OOs.

HANK: Wonder Woman underoos! I did a story about them once. (They used to be flammable. Stories like that,that's why I went to journalism school. Oh wait, I didn't go to journalism school. Anyway, I bought the biggest size possible, and kept them. I loved the camisole with the big star on it.)

Vacations.You know when you're dating someone you want to impress with how flexible and cool you are, you'll do stuff that you would never consider in real life? Well, one long-gone boyfriend (Jim D., you out there?) Convinced me to go CAMPING on the APPALACHIAN TRAIL.

Actually OUTSIDE where there would be NO ELECTRICITY. Sure, I said. La dee dah.

So the night before the camping started, we stayed in a motel called something like the Fishermans Lodge in someplace in North Carolina. Me, Jim, and Bear, Jim's yellow lab. (Jim was very very cute, and a writer. Is, I mean.) In the middle of the night we heard sirens. We leaped up, and went outside. There was the hugest forest fire in the mountains. Huge huge huge. People were gathered around, watching firefighters and etc. up in the hills. Just about where we were going camping the next morning.

"Wow," I said to one man. "What happened?"

He paused. "We guess, Baby did it.

"Baby did it?" I didn't like the sound of it.

"Yup," the man said. (Remember he's very very southern.) "He sets fires (like 'fars') everytime he gets out."

"He's still 'out'?" I asked.

"Yup."

The next morning, we headed for the um, hills. But, in the good news bad news dept, the fire danger got more and more remote, since it, TORRENTIALLY, RAINED THE ENTIRE TIME.

JAN: I forgot to mention that we'd be camping BEFORE the haunted bed and breakfast, and that by contrast -- and constrast only -- the camping seemed ideal! But while great vacations might be terrific rest and all that, let's face it, horrible ones make for much better storytelling!

Come on share yours!