Oddly Enough Blog

Cooking with Catherine: The Barefoot Duchess?

Blog Guy, thanks for finally giving us some coverage of William and Catherine’s royal tour of Canada. We want more!

Well, Catherine did a cooking workshop at the Institut de tourisme et d’hotellerie du Quebec, in Montreal.

Whoa! Please translate that into English! The Institut de tourisme et d’hotellerie du Quebec?

My French is pretty rusty, but I’m pretty sure it means The Institutionalized Hostile Tourists.

Anyway, there appears to be some kind of “gotcha” moment going on here, judging from the finger-pointing and mocking. I gather she made a huge mistake.

Gosh, how bad could it have been?

Are we the meat in a goofy sandwich?

Don’t look now, but the U.S. is surrounded. Mexico went goofy in 2010, and Canada went even goofier.

This is serious. These are our closest neighbors to the north and south, but don’t ask me which is which. I guess I need a map.

Faced with a drug war that has killed 30,000 people, the Mexican government took decisive action, with an advertising and public relations campaign to improve their image. I’m not making this up.

My blog tried to help them out by offering possible advertising slogans such as “Follow the gunfire to Acapulco!” and “Mexico, the land of no sudden moves,” but I never even got a gracias note from them.

And Mexico was the place where the president of the Ford subsidiary said their Lobo pickup trucks are so popular with drug cartel hitmen that regular people are now afraid to drive them and risk being mistaken for criminals.

This was also the country where we reported 280 crocodiles had escaped from a refuge after heavy flooding and were roaming coastal areas. Residents were told not to try to capture or kill them. Hey, thanks for the advice.

Going beyond routine poutine cuisine

Blog Guy, since Canada just hosted the world leaders and spent a fortune to present a good face to the world, I was wondering if they used the opportunity to promote that popular Canadian dish you’ve written about?

You mean poutine, the dish consisting of french fries covered in cheese curds and gravy ,which they eat in Canada and almost nowhere else.

Yes, I’m sure they fed it to the assembled leaders, probably by force. But what you need to understand is, this can be a very sophisticated dish.

Apart from routine poutine, there are many variations. For instance, you can go vegetarian with green poutine, or low-calorie with lean poutine.

There is also a soup version, served in a poutine tureen, and there’s that frozen microwave version for home use, the Jimmy Dean Poutine.

And for cocktail enthusiasts, many Canadian martini bars serve the poutini, a concoction of beef-flavored vodka, gravy schnapps and Irish potato liqueur, garnished with a piece of beef gristle.

Welcome to the “Not So Great Lakes”

Blog Guy, I really envy you working journalists. I just saw a picture of the view from the press center at that G20 Summit up in Toronto, and it’s gorgeous! A waterfall and a lake? How do you get any work done?

Well first, I don’t ever get much work done. And second, if you take a look at a wider angle you’ll see that this is just a still photo projected on a big-screen television at the press center. The “lake” is a shallow indoor pool surrounded by canoes and Adirondack chairs.

That’s ridiculous! Just cheap parlor tricks!

No, not cheap. The Canadian government spent nearly $60,000 on it, to help project a good image and get more coverage of Canada.

Will that work? Will there be more coverage?

You bet. Everybody is now doing extra stories about the stupid “fake lake.” Besides, the big television screen will come in handy when they finish some of that Canadian pornography I blogged about recently.

I have to put that in my MOUTH?

Blog Guy, I follow the exciting world of competitive eating – you know, like that Wing Bowl and stuff like that. But I was baffled to see a reference to the “World Poutine Eating Championship.” What on earth is Poutine?

Thanks a lot for asking. Now I’m going to have nightmares again. Poutine is a dish consisting of french fries covered in cheese curds and gravy. They eat it up there in Canada.

French fries covered in cheese curds and gravy? Ewwwww! I don’t even know what cheese curds ARE!

Nobody does. It’s probably better that way.

How much of this poutine crap did the winner manage to eat, anyway?

Two bites, which is a real testimony to man’s ability to push the limits.

Just two bites? That doesn’t sound like very much. What about the other competitors?

Naked Noon in Saskatoon?

It is dusk in the cabin. The door opens and a brawny lumberjack enters the bedroom, tossing his mighty ax in the corner.

He gazes at a sultry young woman in the bed. She is clad only in flannel pajamas, woolen mittens and a hat with fur earflaps pulled down.

Pouting sensuously, she slowly drizzles a can of pure maple syrup down her front….

Oh baby, get ready for Canadian porn!

It turns out, Canada has dropped its modest fig leaf – or I guess maple leaf – and its first pay TV pornography channel will air soon.

It must use at least 20 percent homegrown Canadian content, thus opening the door for movies such as “Sarah, the Mountie Who Always Gets Her Man,” and “Naked Noon in Saskatoon.”

Is this the same country that changed the name of its venerable history magazine, “The Beaver”,  because of the sexual connotation, and worried that its national anthem was too sexist?