Ruffles All-Dressed Potato Chips

Last night, while hanging out with some attractive people and rolling some Platonic solids, I was offered some of these:

These, as you can probably tell from the picture, are Ruffles All-Dressed Potato Chips. "All dressed" isn't really a phrase applied to food in the States.

I encountered "all dressed" when we were trying to figure out how to order a pizza to our corporate housing. The top choices for toppings were Hawaiian and "All Dressed." Hawaiian is what I thought it would be--ham and pineapple, and closer inspection of All Dressed revealed it is pepperoni, green peppers, and mushrooms.

I assumed that this particular chip flavor would be similar, but based on the packaging, it has vinegar, onion, and tomato flavors. One thing I have not been quite able to bring myself to eat here has been ketchup flavored potato chips (saying "here" is a bit off because you can get them in Virginia and I didn't eat 'em there, either), so when my companions told me that they were a lot like ketchup chips, I had my doubts.

Anyway, the all dressed chips weren't too bad! They reminded me in passing of my favorite chip in the Whole Wide World, the Utz Carolina Style Bar-B-Q chip:
The Washington, DC area was right on the Carolina/Crab Line, where in some stores the specialty chip flavor was Crab Chips (Old Bay flavored) and in others it was Carolina Style.

Carolina Style chips are kind of like vinegar 'n' barbecue, and the All Dressed chips were kind of comparable, although they didn't have the near-painful kick that Carolina Style do. I will probably keep my eye out for other All Dressed chip brands to check out differences.

In case you were worried, I'm not planning on turning this into some kind of hyper-focused food blog where I review only Quebecois potato chips, but I have been feeling the urge to cook for people recently. I always had to restrain myself from feeding REAL American food to my ESL students (restricting myself to maybe writing the words "soul food," "tex-mex," and "creole/cajun" on a notecard I gave them). I'd always ask, "have you tried some American food?" and they'd say, "Yes, pizza, spaghetti, hamburger."

But I would like to cook interesting things for people. Maybe I need to find a Canadian counterpart who wants to cook me Canadian food and we can switch off every other weekend or something. I mean, I like poutine, other people should enjoy biscuits and gravy, right?

Delicious tree juice & my birthday

I turned thirty three days ago, and received two very nice birthday cards, both of which mentioned how much the card-senders had been enjoying reading my blog. But there hasn't been an update to my blog in ages, you might say! How could they possibly continue to enjoy it if you don't update? So update I shall.

Well, a couple of things have happened in the last while. Penelope died. I turned thirty. I unpacked more stuff and worked on my resume. Ben and I registered for new drivers' licenses (they took away our ugly Virginia ones) and for Medicare (the Canadian, everyone-gets-it kind of Medicare).

On my birthday, we went to a sugar shack, or a "cabane à sucre"--I prefer the second one because it sounds a lot less like a strip club or a sorority house, and more like a place where maple sap gets turned into maple syrup. Basically you get a bunch of things that last the winter well--beans, pickled whatnots (beets, cucumbers, cauliflower, tomatoes), ham, eggs--then you pour maple syrup all over these items and eat them.

I adore maple syrup, so I was already predisposed to like this sort of thing. A couple of miles down the road from the farm I grew up on was a place that in retrospect seemed to have made its entire living off of trees--they sold cut-your-own Christmas trees in winter and made maple syrup in early spring.

Canada wins at maple syrup: about 75% of the world's maple syrup comes from Quebec. A maple leaf is on the Canadian flag, and maple syrup is delicious. On the other hand, you have American pancake syrup, which is racist and flavored with fenugreek. The internet tells me that Quebecois call it "sirop de poteau" or "pole syrup" because it's apparently what you get when you tap a telephone pole.

Anyway, a big yellow school bus marked "special" picked us up at Ben's work in the afternoon on Thursday and drove us over with all of the folks from the EA Montreal office. Ben's coworkers are all cool people, and a lot younger than his previous job--someone brought a baby and the dudes in their mid-twenties were surprised. Before it was sort of strange that we didn't have any kids, now it's kind of strange that we're married.

As usual, I hope I didn't say anything horribly offensive to a fairly multicultural group. I know a lot of folks view it as a badge of honor to not be PC about these sorts of things, but I guess I'm just the sort of person who worries more about being a jerk. It's just a large shift from being safe and comfortable at home to a place where I actually have an accent. Me, who's always sounded like a newscaster! Thrilling!

I will close this with an exciting list of Things I Could Eat a Nearly Unlimited Amount of (but not together because that would be nasty):

1. Maple Syrup
2. Deviled Eggs
3. Oreos

(Pictures thanks to Ben's coworker and amateur photographer, Gary Stewart.)