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.
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
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.
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.
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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