What's cookin' Quebec?

All of my foreign travels center around food. I like to visit the market and try what the locals are snacking on - whether I know what's in it or not.

In Vietnam I had some kind of sticky rice and pasty sweet bean stuff steamed in a little square banana leaf packet. I spent a week in Mexico eating nothing but tacos, quesadillas and pozole off the street carts. The Thais serve this amazing corn, sugar, butter, coconut mash from a steaming pot on the sidewalk.

48 hours from now I'll be in Montreal - which isn't tremendously foreign as travels go. But it's still a different country, with a culture and language, so I was gearing up for some fun food adventures . . . until I read about poutine.

Voila the famous dish of Quebec.

If you're still reading this and not leaning over the sink waiting to hurl, I'll explain what you're looking at: fries topped with cheese curds and drenched in gravy.

Here I thought Montreal was going to be all sophisticated and European - they're so intent on all things French that even the STOP signs read "ARRET." (This is not the case in France, where they're comfortable enough with their Frenchness to allow the evil English language on their signs because 90 percent of the world knows the meaning of "STOP" and only .07% of the world has a clue what "ARRET" means when barrelling down on it at 40 miles an hour.)

I digress.

The prized dish of Quebec is basically the same thing my dorm cafeteria served every Wednesday (substituting chili and grated cheese for curds and gravy). As an naive freshman, I assumed the meal was nutritionist sanctioned if it was being served in the dorm. And that's how I ended up with the worst case of heartburn in my young life.

Henceforth I figured the chili-cheese-fries dinner option was a cruel joke by a bored cafeteria cook. Now I know he was probably from Quebec and just feeling a bit homesick.