All the things my mother never taught me

Loren loves all things Canadian. He wants to travel there, live there and always talk about it. I don’t blame him, there have been many times over the years that I have wanted to abandon this consumer obssessed country and go in search of a more down to earth corner of the world. But I do digress…. So when his teacher offered him an assignment on any country in the world, whoa and behold Loren chose Canada. His Canada interest increased significantly this past January when he and I went to Denver to pick up two snowskater boys for the Winter X-Games. Loren was dazzled by their Canadianness and fired about a billion questions in their faces over the course of the weekend.
For the past week Loren has been glued to his computer as he freely explored the Canadian connection. I am not sure how much he really learned, I suspect much of it was a ruse to be able to watch snowskating videos without me riding his back about homework. The final bit of this project is a presentation during which he will reveal all the things he learned and serve a Canadian dish. At first Loren wanted to make some sort of cheesecake thing that contained an ingrediant found only in Candadian stores. He tossed this part of the project at me last night at 8:30 after getting home from a weekend at his dad’s. I told him I really loved him but my love ended at trying to substitute this mysterious powder for something from our kitchen and that there was no way I would stay up until 2 a.m. trying to concoct a cheesecake thing. The kitchen is not a comfortable place for me under most circumstances, but add in that sort of stress and I might have another of the panic attacks I have successfully kept at bay for the past several weeks. As we sat in front of his computer trying to come up with something, I had an inspiration, “Hey, what about those cheesy fries things, you know the ones Rico and Josh (our X-Games friends) were raving about?”
“Oh, yeah! I looked those up. I think we might be missing a few ingredients. But they are called Putang fries.”
My head whipped around and I said, “I’m sorry. What?”
“Yeah, hold on. Let me look it up. Yep, here they are, P-O-U-T-I-N-E. They have gravy, cheese and fries in them. Yum.”
So we went to the store and picked up fries. No luck on the cheese curds, though I must admit I don’t even know what a cheese curd is -and I don’t think I much like the name.
This morning we got up and heated the gravy my mother had made, I tossed the fries in the oven and Loren grated cheese. My brother called from Boulder and wondered why I was not only in the kitchen but busy at the stove. I explained we were making Putang fries and he started laughing so hard that Loren heard him and began clammering up and down to find out what the hoo ha was all about. I explained the dish to my brother as I tried to brush Loren off, he very much resembled Stewie from this clip from Andie. When I finally hung up the phone, I could no longer put off Loren and so began to explain a few things.
“Okay, so you know there are some words you just don’t use. Ever.”
“Yeah, yeah. I know mom. That one that rhymes with glut. I know you don’t like that one. And the other one, the first part of pussy cat, I know you can’t say that in front of most people. Let’s see, then there’s the one that sounds like other trucker and I know you can never say the one that rhymes with runt in front of mixed company. So what’s the deal?”
“Um, okay. Well, Poutine has a sort of french pronuciation and in French you often don’t pronounce the end of words. So Poutine ends up being more like Pootan which can end up sounding like Poontang which refers to many of the other words we just discussed.”
“Oh, I get it!’ And Loren doubled over in giggles. He then stood up and with a completely straight face and with a voice that was inaudible to his siblings and my mom in the other room, he said, “So I’m taking Pussy Fries for my presentation. Cool.”
I hope he can get through his presentation without mentioning that little tid bit.