Warm gravy, melted gooey cheese, crispy fries … let’s dig into some traditional Canadian food and have poutine!
Once of the (many) perks of participating in National Blog Posting Month, where bloggers post daily for a full month, is that I can tackle many of the topics that I’ve had on a running list on my phone for the past … um … few years. The good news is, I have no shortage of topics; the bad news is, sometimes I get a little more behind than I’d like.
So let’s go back to Spring Break this year, when we visited Canada!
When it comes to visiting anyplace new, I always make a point to seek out the “must eat” food items of that area, to really get a taste, no pun intended, on what it’s like to be a local. And when I started searching the food items that were not to be missed in Canada, poutine kept coming up.
And with good reason.
Poutine is a popular French-Canadian dish that is comprised of french fries, hot brown gravy, and melty, gooey, cheese curds. I mean, really, what’s not to love? The dish has been around since the 1950s, and legend has it that besides being a great hangover cure dish the day after a bender, it was a popular meal amongst truck drivers because it’s hearty and not as greasy as you’d expect.
But if you’ve been a visitor to my site for any length of time (or especially if you follow me on Instagram or Snapchat), you know I was in as soon as I heard cheese.
Because #cheeseismyhappyplace.
Poutine’s popularity, of course, traveled beyond the Canadian borders, and if you’re in the US, particularly in the New Jersey area, an adaptation of poutine is more commonly known as disco fries. The biggest difference between the two dishes is that disco fries features melted mozzarella, as opposed to the original cheese curds of the Canadian version.
Now that we’ve covered the what, onto the where.
Just as I’ve said before, if you want to know where to find the best local eats, ASK A LOCAL.
And so when we were in the middle of a downtown grocery store, I asked a store clerk where to go for the best poutine. Not where she sends tourists, but where SHE would go.
Which is exactly how we found ourselves a few miles away, hunting for the bright orange Potato Heads food truck in a grocery store parking lot.
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