Round of 16, Day 2 - Switzerland and Canada - World Cup Eating Challenge

I spent most of Sunday morning debating between doing Canada or Switzerland. I ended up deciding on Canada. I knew I was going to be making Poutine and since I was going to be out with my friends, it seemed like a good post-drinking food.

I ran to the market to pick up fries and cheese curds... and then couldn't find cheese curds. I checked between the three cheese sections and couldn't find them anywhere.

Side note: do you ever notice how most markets these days have not one, not two, but THREE cheese sections??? THREE. It's pretty consistent too. You have the packaged cheeses (Kraft, Lucerne, etc), cooking/ salad/ snacking cheeses (mozzarellas, fetas, and bleus), and then the gourmet cheeses (Kerrygold, bries, etc). The sorting kind of varies from store to store, but the point is that when you can't find the cheese you're looking for, you have THREE places to look.

Anyways, in the process of looking for cheese curds, I ended up finding Swiss fondue cheese. I decided just to do both. I'd get some veggies for dipping in the fondue and then make the poutine as the main course with some high end Kerrygold cheddar instead of cheese curds.

The fondue mix was ok. I probably would just try to make my own next time but as I mentioned yesterday, I've had a hard week and I wanted to find ways to do the challenge without adding any un-needed stress. 

For dipping, I got cherry tomatoes, zucchini, mushrooms, and I heated up some leftover lamb. I bought some apples as well but totally forgot to cut them up. 

The poutine was a really easy and awesome dish as well. I baked some ready made fries, covered them in grated cheese, and then poured gravy on top. It was the perfect post drinking food and I'm really happy I bought extra fries so I can make these again some day.

Speaking of poutine - I had been joking with some friends that it was the only Canadian dish I could think of. They found this Wikipedia article... which proved that I wasn't too far off. To summarize, here are the top Canadian foods according to an informal survey:

1. Poutine (51%)
2. Montreal-style bagels (14%)
3. Salmon jerky (dried smoked salmon) (11%)
4. Perogy (10%)
5. Ketchup chips (7%)
6. Nova Scotian Donair (4%)
7. California roll (1%)

Looks like I picked a good dish to represent that country.

 Tomorrow we get back on track to more paleoish/ gluten free food and less getting by.