Tartiflette.

Today I faced a sad and inevitable event. allrecipes.com has failed me.

Following my family's grand tradition of never eating turkey on Thanksgiving Day, we have decided to substitute our traditional pot roast, spaghetti or bean soup with tartiflette- a gooey and deliciously fattening French/Swiss Alps dish I adore.

Creating this dish was first concieve as a gift to my grandparents, then as a possiblity for my birthday supper this evening, and finally to becoming our Thanksgiving dinner dish. Finding a viable recipe, to be used in Southwestern Iowa, is another matter altogether. My first instinct was, of course, to head to allrecipes.com. To my horror, they didn't even have an idea on this dish. I next, of course, googled the recipe name- which returned a few mildly helpful responses. I do have three english language recipes now, though one has all its measurements and such in metric. The biggest problem with all these recipes is that they call for, either the proper cheese of the dish- reblochon, or a similarly difficult-to-find-in-the-Midwest cheese. However, I was determined that someone would have an incredible and edible recipe; one using a adequate substitute cheese which can be found in the Midwest.

So I started with my own blog and began following a few of my links to the cooking sites I've so far enjoyed, and returned to square one at google; one by one, they all failed me. Even good ol' Martha Stewart, gourmande extraordinaire and her website failed me. *Sigh*.

So I've resigned myself to research and develop a practical Midwest version of this delicious recipe. Once I do, I'll leave it here in case you're bold enough to try it yourself. (This is actually a outright attempt at getting you to return at least once to my blog.)


However, there were a few upsides to my desperate and despairing search for tartiflette recipes. I found a lovely little blog of an American woman in a Parisian suburb- she recently made tartiflette- who focuses mostly on cooking, and French cooking at that! Check out her photos on delicious tartiflette. I also found a blog whose title just makes me laugh. I also have a feeling that if I investigated this blog a bit more, I'd enjoy the text just as much. If nothing else, you should go just to check out his title graphics- rather humourous.

Besides getting a visual on tartiflette, Banlieue Blog also talks about the dish itself and how she made it. For myself, the first time I encountered this delicious dish, I was tripping about the marché du Noël in Toulouse, with Kim and Violet. We were tripping around a bit because it was one of our first interactive visits to the marché and we were determined to experience it all. This, of course, included sharing our first ever glass of vin chaud- also know as mulled wine. Now, none of the three of us was a great drinker, and I believe that we'd yet to have lunch- so we became, understandably, a bit tipsy. Thus tripping around the marché in Capitole, we encountered the best booth ever! They were giving out free samples of gruyére (also a first, and now favorite, for me) and right next to it, they were cooking up humongous batches of tartiflette; possibly even substituting gruyére and probably something else for the necessary reblochon. Did it ever smell heavenly! And if you know me and food, you won't believe it, but I didn't actually eat it that year. But truly, I didn't. As I mentioned, I think we were on our way to lunch at the time, and it was near the end of the program- I was starting to run short on funds.

It wasn't until I returned to France that I had tartiflette. It was a distinctly cold day in late November and I had a miserable cold and fever. But I was suppose to go pick up my student card/pass for the regional bus system, so I braved the outdoors. However, I forgot it was France and that lunch didn't end till 2pm. I ended up drifting around the marché in Place St. Louis, and realising that I hadn't had lunch and was actually hungry, I investigated my options. I decided on the tartiflette as possibly being easier on my raw throat. But the serving guy jokingly refused to serve up a dish until I had correctly pronounce the word. Hard to do with my retched cold that day. But it was worth it, and I've never looked back since falling in love with that dish.

So to quote a new found source of amusement, "In Tartiflette, we trust." Bon appetit!