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?

Smoked Meat and Poutine: Check.

Montreal is surprisingly Jewish for a city that's historically been filled with super-devout French Catholics. We have a large Hasidic community in one section of town (smaller than, but comparable to NYC's), and a lot of the city's food bears more similarities to NYC than I expected. Two of the city's signature foods are smoked meat and bagels which are allegedly unique to the city--I haven't tasted a "real" Montreal bagel yet, but smoked meat is just...smoked meat. That's its name. Smoked meat is like, a thing. Let me 'splain:

The idea of "smoked meat" can be confusing because it sounds more like a category that would include things like smoked salmon and whatever lutefisk is, but instead it is its own unique thing, like pastrami or corned beef. As a matter of fact, smoked meat exists somewhere on the continuum between pastrami and corned beef, although it tastes like neither. Wikipedia informs me that the methods use to preserve the meat are unique, and you can go and read more about it there.

We figured we'd kill two birds with one stone, so we ordered some poutine. Fun fact: if you're French Canadian, you say it more like the guy who runs Russia than "poo-teen." Again, Wikipedia provides cool insight into possible etymology of the word. Most people know that poutine is cheese curds and gravy over fries, but what nobody seemed to be able to tell me was what in the world a cheese curd actually is. After consuming cheese curds, I can tell you that they are vaguely squishy and squeaky (leading to their nickname of "squeaky cheese") and not particularly melty. They are cheese, which is really all I needed to know in the first place.

We obtained these smoked meat sandwiches and poutine at Dunn's, which is one of the places to go to get smoked meat, the other being Schwartz's. What they don't mention when they recommend that you go to this restaurant is that their mascot, a pickle who this website informs me is named "Dillon Dunn," is TERRIFYING.

It seems like anything you'd order that would normally have pastrami or corned beef on it comes with smoked meat instead; I ordered a Reuben and it was delicious.