Opération Tourtière Poutine

(Originally published 3/14/14)

Mon ami m'a challengé a écrire cet aventure en français but fuck that shit, I can't be funny in French.  Another thing: I don't know if I could even have sex in French. I was thinking about that once - I live right next door to Québec, the land of easy beer and easier women, and I realized that if I were ever lucky enough to bed one of these Francophone fillies, I would have literally NO IDEA how to fuck them. With words, I mean. The penis part, I got that - with French girls all you have to do is drop trou in the same room as them and their vaginal vacuum pressure will do the rest of the work. But I wouldn't know how to tell her how badly she wants my hot load or ask what hole she needs filled without sounding like I was back in grade 7 with Mme McLellan at Ecole Catholique Colonel Forbes in Petawawa.

We (mon ami, see above) were at the Kingmakers show the other day and she revealed to me her secret for sounding like a natural-born Québec girl while being only partially bilingual: add an essy "z" sound to your d's and t's when they're followed by an "i" sound. Like this: "dynamite" becomes "dzynamite". "Tourtière" becomes "tourtsière". "Poutine" becomes OH MY GOD I NEED TO DROP EVERYTHING AND MAKE TOURTIERE POUTINE.

So that's how that came about. The two most delicious Québec foods I know of on one plate? There's no way this can fail! Or so I thought. On to the food. For starters, I'm no chef. I can heat food up in creative ways, and I can dice veggies like a motherfucker, but when it comes to creating stuff from scratch, I'll leave that to the professionals. So I started by purchasing everything pre-prepared. The CanCon of this meal is off the charts:

 

Lets not kid ourselves, this is a heat-and-serve meal. I won't pretend I had anything to do with the flavours. I plopped the pie in the oven as instructed, and went to take a dump. 'Twas on the john that I had an epiphany, as I often do: my original plan was to bake the pie, take a slice, put cheese curds on and add a hot mess of gravy. I realized during my bowel movement that when the gravy ran off the edge of the pie, the cheese curds will have only been in contact with the gravy for a few seconds, and wouldn't get gooey.  The solution was to heat the gravy and pour it over a bowl full of cheese curds, to soften them up before administering them to the pie. I did this for 5 minutes while the pie was cooling. Yes it was super tempting to just eat this and put ketchup on the pie.

I told you, this is an easy recipe. After 5 minutes I cut up some pie (anything less than a 1/4 slice and I might as well declare myself the gayest vegan of all time)...

 ...and plopped the gooey gravy and curd soup on top. Et voilà:

Some salt and pepper to taste, and... disappointment. Dammit. Not in the way you'd think, though. It wasn't terrible but there was an immediate and obvious problem that rendered the entire experiment moot: the spices in the meat and the delicious butteriness of the pie crust easily overpowered the cheese curds to the point where for the life of me I just could not taste the curds. I tried really hard, like when you're trying to keep hard for a girl you pretty much don't want to ever see again but you've been naked for 10 minutes and an exit now would be awkward. But I couldn't keep it up, and my mouth just said "Hey neat, meat pie with gravy is good! What's this flavourless piece of rubber doing there?" In the end, I could barely finish the plate and it wasn't because it tasted bad. I think it was just the disappointment that left a bad taste in my mouth, and the gravy just couldn't wash it away.
All that to say: Me and the band are playing this amazing show at Babylon on Thursday April 10th. It's called Beer, Barley and Food and it features food/beer pairings from local chefs and local breweries. How could this go wrong? Chefs from Whalesbone, Manx Pub, Das Lokal, Murray Street, Patty's Pub and Quinn's, pairing their food up with beer selections from Beaus, Clocktower, Kichesippi and Ashton Brewing Co. Seriously: does this not sound amazing? Click the link below for details
https://www.facebook.com/events/247457192093150/
See you guys at the show!