Two local foods: dried mushrooms and garlic

Neither of these foods are distinctive to Quebec (and of course, versions exist throughout the world), but their Quebec expressions at a local grocery where I shop were interesting.

And, I'm endlessly fascinated with food ways and food culture in places that we live or visit.

First, these handsomely packaged dried mushrooms caught my eye -- a wild mushroom medley -- a wild forest mix -- how cool is that?  The packaging alone was worth it.

I had bought similar dried mushrooms in Italy last spring (porcini) that were so delicious, I brought a very large bag back home to the U.S. And my sister's wild harvested mushrooms in New Mexico -- dried and savored later -- YUM.

So these were definitely worth trying!
A small company in Montreal is packaging the mix as part of their endeavors, described in this nice article.

They ARE delicious.

Another interesting locally produced product were these remarkably small garlic heads, labelled as Ail du Québec. Unimpressive by home-grown standards in my Carolina home garden (by commercial standards, too), these heads are barely an inch across (shown here both with a teaspoon and a ruler for scale).

They're a lovely purple color, but tiny.  I'll see how it tastes.  Garlic is clearly a more challenging crop to grow in the very short growing season here in summer.  Commercially available fresh garlic tends to be imported from Spain or China and is sometimes rather tired looking.  The Spanish garlic can be quite good, but isn't always available.  Thank goodness the chopped freeze-dried garlic is quite decent, too.