Soirée Québécoise

Last Wednesday night (Feb 9), we had some friends over for dinner. We met them through couchsurfing, a website that allows those who are registered to look people up in different cities around the world and ask them to sleep on their couch. This concept was developed for travelers on tight budgets. So let's say you want to go to Split in Croatia, you simply look up the people who have couches available there and you ask them if you can stay with them a night or two. The whole thing is free.
Back in October, I chose to use the website to find friends here in Limoges. Luckily for me, a group had already been created for those who want to make friends in Limoges.
I joined the group and presented Martin and myself in a short, bilingual e-mail. Within hours, I was invited to go out for a drink the next evening with the group coordinator, Fanny.
The next evening, I went to a famours bar in Limoges called "Brasserie Michard" and met a lot of great people. There were mostly French people but I also met a scottish man, a romanian girl, an american girl, and a group of chinese people who unfortunately kept to themselves all night.
As months have gone by, Martin and I have gotten closer to a smaller set of people from couchsurfing. One of them, Renaud, has already been to Québec and loved every bit of it. So the day after a raclette evening at Joanne's, a girl from Scotland, I invited four people over for dinner the next Wednesday for a Québécois night.
I served poutine, sheppard's pie, and poudding chômeur.
The poutine I had some trouble with. Apart from the fries, it's impossible to find the right ingredients in France, or anywhere else in the world outside of Canada.

For the sauce, I used the sauce that can be found in a large can of cassoulet. I just drained the beans and sausages of all the sauce and used that as a base for the mix. Its mostly made up of lard, which is perfect. Then, I prepared some meat sauce you can find in any Knorr packet. I tried two different ones: sauce trois poivres and another one which had mushrooms in it. The name evades me now. I prefered the latter. I mixed each of them with some of the lard and it made a pretty decent poutine sauce.

For the cheese, forget about finding any "fromage en crotte qui fait "kouik kouik"" here. The cheese lady will only look at you weird. So I asked for the youngest cheddar they had which, in Québec, translates to a medium cheddar... going on strong.

It was good, actually. But they especially liked the sheppard's pie and the poudding chômeur which was much lighter than the first time I made it. The first time I made some for Martin, I nearly found myself having to learn how to drive stick-shift in 5 min flat so I could take him to the hospital to treat his diabetic coma.
This time, the cake was nice and fluffy and the sauce was a lot better. I got the recipe for the poudding off "recettes du Québec" but this time, instead of using white sugar for the cake, I used brown sugar. It's a lot better.