Pork Rinds, Pirogi, Injera, Oh My!
My Food for Thought pard Nancy Leson happily cruises the strip malls of Highway 99 in search of hole-in-the-wall international grocery stores and she thinks you should, too. "Yes," she says, "And the more interesting, unusual to us, and adventurous the better."
In our latest chat she told me about some swell finds she's recently come across. Most serendipitous was Enkutatash, the Edmonds Ethiopian market she recently shopped.
"I've probably driven by this place ten million times." If Nance stretches the truth here it's only because she was as she says "hot to get my hands on some injira," the stretchy Ethiopean bread. But once in the store she discovered something else she wanted.
"There was this big, long line to a window in the back. I asked the gentlemen in line with me what was going on and he said 'Meat'." Because that was the day the once a week meat truck from eastern Washington arrived. Nancy walked out with her injira and two pounds of the leanest, reddest stew meat she'd ever seen.
"It was absolutely delicious – kind of chewy in the way that grass fed beef is."
And that's just a small part of Nancy's Highway 99 chow crawls. There's still the Mexican, Eastern European and more to hear about in this week's installment of Food for Thought.
"If it has four legs and isn't a table, eat it."
– Cantonese dictum
