I last wrote about lovely Greek Easter family traditions and cooking sessions with my yiayias. Honest, good clean fun.

Which is precisely why I’m now compelled to write about something down and dirty. To keep the balance.

Today it’s all about outrageous, positively indecent (and calorie-defying) drinking food. This idea came to me recently while I was drinking (alcoholic) ginger beer with a Canadian friend in a Canadian bar. There was only one thing to order in that situation.

‘One poutine please’.

If you think poutine sounds French, that’s because it is – or at least it hails from French speaking Quebec. Chunky fries are topped with brown gravy and cheese curds so the whole thing is a greasy, salty, cheesy mess. A pretty tasty mess to be fair.

According to my sidekick Ving, this was not poutine in its true form – partly because we just don’t make cheese curds in the same way the Canadians do. But he felt the sentiment was there. Apparently McDonald’s does a version in Canada – I’m not entirely confident about how that might taste.

Poutine is pretty closely related to the cheesy chips that you see on pub menus far and wide throughout the UK. My favourite was a version I came across in Tresco (while snacking on scotch eggs naturally). Good old fashioned chips are drowned with melted cheese so there’s nothing sophisticated going on there but they certainly go down well when you’re drinking copious amounts of local cider.

While we’re on the topic of fried foods, it doesn’t get much more debaucherous that chicharrónes or fried pork rinds. That’s where they take something already extremely fatty and proceed to deep fry it to really amp up the fat factor. Sounds like something Homer Simpson would eat. Read More