While I generally cook at home once in a while I drag myself out to find what culinary delights Montreal has to offer. My partner in crime for these ventures is my good friend Roxy. Roxy is pretty much the only other foodie I know. When I rhapsodize gleefully over my joy at finding obscure ingredients I know she understand.
This Friday we went down to the Old Montreal to a new food fair called Saveurs et Tentations (Flavours and Temptations) featuring mostly small Quebec producers of artisanal foods. Now Old Montreal is hands down the nicest part of the city. If you're too poor to get all the way to Europe (like I am), it's as close to Europe as you can get in North America. Here are a couple of shots I took:
As I am writing this I am trying to remember everything I ate yesterday. The fair had a lot of merchants that offered tastings so Roxy and I had a nice spread of food.
The picture above was of my favourite thing: raclette cheese melted over baguette bread with a German wiener. Yum.
This was a pastry maker who had a big selection of chocolates and macaroons. The colours were so pretty, personally I chose a purplish-pinkish one (raspberry) and it was crunchy and sweet with a soft center.
Here is Roxy with her macaroon and some chocolate dipped candied orange and grapefruit peel.
This was a maple slushy. It was basically ice, water and maple syrup. So simple but so good. It was sweltering when we were there so I was happy to get something cold to drink.
This was something called pain de paysan (peasant bread) along with a little dessert of layers of dark, milk and white chocolate mousses and little chocolate covered crispy rice bits (yum). The bread was covered with roughly chopped black forest ham and cheese (Gruyere I think). This was really filling and hearty.I forgot to take photos of everything I ate (sorry!) but there was also some 'blonde' beer which had a touch of honey and some raspberry wine (I really should have bought a bottle of it). The first picture of this post and the first thing I ate while we were there was smoked duck breast salad. It was actually served cold and even though I am not usually a fan of cold meat it was excellent. Roxy had a kind of duck spring roll which was also really good.
The fair was a lot of fun. This year was the first year that they did it and I really hope that they repeat it again next year because I will most definitively go if they do and I'll try to remember to take more pictures!
