August 25, 2008

Adventures in Canadian Eating, Take 1

So Hubby and I went up to Canada the other week for a nice long vacation. We started in New Brunswick - so that's where this post will start.

In NB, visiting our good friends, we went to the city market on Saturday. There were so many delicious sights and smells and flavors it was so sad we did that first and not on our way back to the states - we would have come home with much more!

Here's the market!





While there, we bought some fresh garlic. We have a friend whose family goes up to Canada to work on a garlic farm each summer - they get free room and board in exchange for their labor and they get a ton of garlic to take home and they always bring us a few bulbs. Each year we use one and then we plant the others in our garden to harvest in the late summer. So while confronted with this great local garlic that smelled divine... we had to buy some of our own. We spent the rest of the trip drying it out in the back window of the car, and it made us crave Italian food the whole trip!


While at the market, I saw a sign for dulse.



I grabbed the hubs and we spoke with the vendor who let us sample some. It's a sea vegetable, like seaweed or kelp that is dried on the rocks. It's got a VERY strong fishy/oceany/sea flavor. Being from the coast out here, I didn't think it would bother me but I couldn't stand it, it was so chewy, tough and strong. Hubs however, loved the dulse so he had to buy a bag to bring home with him.


I let Adam enjoy his dulse while I picked out a great local strawberry and basil vinegar that is just out of this world delicious!

Aside from the excitement, the neatest thing was waiting in line to buy our vinegar, we were behind a French Family (Ok maybe they were from Quebec) but they spoke all in French and they ordered du jambon... oooo du jambon - hubs and I were in heaven with the French - Jambon is one of our favorite French words. For those non Francais speakers - Jambon is Ham.

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