Tartiflette Savoyard

We have been waiting for Montmartre Grape Harvest Festival since we first arrived in Paris. We knew that it is always held the first weekend in October so even though we were just there last night, we headed up there again today to participate in the festivities. We figured Friday would have the least amount of people and I think we were right!
I absolutely love the Montmartre area. I don't know why...it isn't glamorous, nor is it particularly clean. But I feel life up there. The view is spectacular.
The streets are filled with people coming and going, and it has the most amount of fabric shops I have ever seen. We are talking beautiful fabrics of every kind. It is like heaven to those who love fabrics and sewing. In a 4 block area there are easily more fabric stores than all of Arizona. Most are little shops but a few are large. In the larger stores they have mannequins displaying dresses made from a certain fabric (like ours used to do) except these
mannequins are about 3 ft. tall! I just love looking at the fabrics and at the thousands of decorative pillow cases (they have the decorator pillows without the stuffing, you just buy the case and put it over your old sofa pillow).
But on to our Grape Harvest Festival. We decided to walk the 200+ stairs up to the Sacre Coeur (you can count them if you want or trust me on this one) area instead of taking the funnicular because the weather was so beautiful.

Once we got to the top there were vendor booths/tents set up that came from all over France and the different regions. There were cheese booths, sausage booths (see picture), oyster booths, foie gras booths, wine booths, nut booths, chocolate booths, cake/pastry booths, wine booths, mushroom booths, potato booths, herb booths, wine booths, dried fruit booths, honey and jam booths, bread booths and more wine booths. I wish I could have stopped at every single booth (of course except the wine!). They all gave samples if you wanted. It was an epicurean delight!!! We walked all the way around a couple of times, decided what we wanted and settled on this most delicious potato dish -Tartiflette Savoyard!!!!

They had a huge, wok-like frying pan, that contained sliced potatoes, ham, cream and some sort of brie-like cheese. They fried up the potatoes, ham and onions and then added these blocks of cheese (to melt into the cream). We got our serving in a little tin foil pan, like the ones we bake bread in and then served up a good sized sausage with it! Oh my, it was very, very good and we shared one but I could have easily eaten my own. I had seen this interesting cake earlier and discovered it was a "cheesecake". It looked like it had chocolate on top but was some sort of burned crust. It didn't taste burned, just looked it. After our potato dish we then we ate part of the cheesecake I had purchased (see picture).
We took a few bites of it, kind of cakey not like the cheesecake I had imagined, but soon got a little turned off on it when we discovered mold! I don't think that they used blue cheese in the cake so this was real mold (as opposed to fake mold!). But we have eaten so much mold on our Brie cheese that I don't know why this bothered us!

We couldn't leave without visiting the chocolate booth! They had chocolate of every kind and so we chose a block of chocolate that contained almonds, pistachios & hazelnuts. So many nuts it made it hard to cut so we just took bites out of it!

We are so happy we went today instead of tomorrow because the crowds were minimal and the food fresh. They say thousands and thousands attend this festival every year. I would go back again just for my Tartiflette Savoyard (we found many recipes online, you must try it!). Print this post