Monday, June 25, 2012

Ville Platte Smoked Meat Festival

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One can hardly be prepared for the psychedelic meat parade that is the Ville Platte Smoked Meat Festival, or as they call it, La Festival de la Viande Boucanée.

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It could not have been a prettier, hotter, smokier day. My buddy Clarke and were both judges, which I sounds like the highest possible honor until you get to the beauty pageant awards, where one of the male infant participants was crowned King Baby Master. You don't get a better title in life

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My team judged the amateur smoked seafood and then the professional championship round, but once a category is judged, we were free to try a bit of everything. We tasted probably 100 different smoked meat dishes. The discovery for me (above) was how much I like ponce, kind of a Cajun haggis - pork stuffing smoked in a pork stomach. I'm not a weird meat fetishist like those that will sing the praises of offal over choice cuts, but ponce is good, y'all. I want slices of that on po-boy bread served to me at a bayou side deck in Heaven.

It was so much meat and I held in there until I hit the wall with this tasso-wrapped, smoked frog leg.

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Thanks so much to the great people from Ville Platte, especially Sharon Fontenot of the Swamp Pop Museum for hooking me up with this auspicious gig. I thought I never wanted to see meat agin, but we stopped at the B&S on the way out of town, and this Fred Flintstone cut in the butcher case sent me to the car for my camera. Sharon promised to take me a tour of the meat markets of Ville Platte somewhere in the near future, when I am able to eat again.

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Bear witness to the whole thing in the slideshow below. I'm trying out different slideshow options so let me know if this doesn't work for you somehow.

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