Difficulty Level Intermediate

My son's girlfriend Rebecca had a dinner party last week and the theme was Quebecois cooking. I took a tortiere as my contribution to the party and she served a fantastic French onion soup and poutine. For the uninitiated in the reading audience, poutine is a dish consisting of french fries sprinkled liberally with cheese curds and then slathered with gravy (in this case vegetarian gravy). It sounds disgusting, I know, but don't knock it until you've tried it because even while you can't believe that you are eating it, you can't help thinking how delicious it is.

However, the piece de resistance for the evening was the ploye. Ploye are buckwheat pancakes, cooked on one side only and often served with maple syrup. Rebecca got the recipe from Au Pied de Cochon by Montreal restauranteur Martin Picard. But Rebecca added her own stamp. The original recipe called the ploye to have a layer of potato, a layer of bacon, then one of cheese topped with fois gras. Rebecca drew the line at the fois gras and substituted a slice of pork tenderloin. She also created a vegetarian version, taking out the bacon and tenderloin and using marinated tofu instead. If you use the tofu, marinate it the night before if possible. Because she was making a vegetarian version she used vegetarian stock in the maple sauce, but the original calls for veal stock. She also made the ploye with just the buckwheat flour because she wanted a nuttier tasting pancake. The resulting pancakes were almost black and had a wonderful, intense flavour.

It looks difficult, but it really isn't. Rebecca had everything prepped in advance, so that once her guests were there, she just had to put everything together and slip it into the oven. She left it all on the baking sheet so that people could use a spatula to help themselves.

INGREDIENTS