NAIWE writing prompt: Describe your favorite holiday food.
My heritage is French-Canadian and my mother is from Quebec province, and my absolute favorite holiday food is a traditional French-Canadian dish called tourtiere (which should have an “accent grave” over the first “e” but I don’t know how to make those on WordPress). What on Earth is tourtiere, you ask?
It’s a meat pie, and it’s delicious.
To begin, tourtiere has a warm, flaky pie crust which covers its top and forms the bottom. The crust is golden in color, and practically melts in my mouth with every bite. When the tourtiere is served (i.e., sliced), the crust often falls apart and the meat spills onto the plate, but who cares? It’s still scrumptious.
The inside of the pie is a cooked mixture of ground pork, veal, and beef, which is seasoned with a generous amount of spices. Oh, how I wish I could remember what the spices are. They make the pie spicy, but not excessively so.
The consistency of the pie is a little bit dry, but not too dry. One will not see liquid on one’s plate when one has a slice of tourtiere.
I have helped my mother make tourtiere before, but it has been years since I have, and I confess that I’ve never made it myself. I am very skittish about using the oven.
Maybe someday, when I get braver and am less neurotically afraid of house fires.
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