#82- Beaver Tails

I've eaten many an exotic dish, from bison roasts to crocodile nuggets and even ostrich meatballs, but one of the most delicious has got to be beaver tail.

For those not familiar with the famed beaver tails you should know two things: you should get familiar with them fast and don't worry, they aren't actually the tails of real beavers.

Really what they are is dough, stretched out into the shape of a beaver's tail and fried until golden brown and then topped with delicious toppings such as chocolate sauce and bananas or cinnamon and sugar.

So no, they wouldn't be a food featured on Body Break segments (something for those 90s kids), but they are a great bad habit once in a while.

But beaver tails are more than that. They are a Canadian delicacy (Canada: serving up horribly addictive and unhealthy fried food for more than a century). This is usually how it goes with traveling foodies: they flock from all over just to get a taste of the beaver tail, are a little disappointed that it's not real beaver and eventually leave happy with chocolate smeared all over their faces.

Beaver tails are also a staple of one of the greatest events I have ever experienced; skating on the Rideau Canal. Skating on the canal itself is amazing (the largest rink in the world!), but when the wind is blowing and you can't feel your fingers, having a nice warm beaver tail in your hands warms them up quite nicely. And you don't even have to take off your skates.

In short, beaver tails are something to enjoy and to take pride in. They are a Canadian invention, right up there with the zipper, basketball and twelve different ways to say sorry. They are delicious and certainly not nutritious. They are a tradition, a hand warmer, a conversation starter and one of the best possible ways to end off a night out with friends.

So I am grateful for beaver tails. I am grateful that we can honour one of our greatest national animals with its very own food. I am grateful for how good they taste and that I can feel better about eating them after having skated a few kilometres. I am grateful that they are so popular and awesome that the president of the United States came all the way up here just to have one (and do some other diplomatic stuff I guess). And I am grateful that I can say I've had a beaver tail before, because that's something not too many people can admit they've done.