About to ready,set,go!
All finished!
Go Nuwan! I'm super proud! Besides it was a lovely way to spend the morning, lapping up the Seattle sun and clear blue skies.
However, this is more the story of how we decided to celebrate.
Stuff ourselves with pies and sausages rolls of course!
You see, Washington does pretty well by food standards... but we're spoiled in Australia. The more we eat the more we realise that Australian food, regardless of nationality is pretty amazing.
We've had Thai here, it's pretty good but lacks the variety. The Malaysian restaurant has Nasi Goreng but it's doesn't hold a candle to anything at Temasek. We're a bit wary of Chinese food, every dish seems to start with some form of deep fried, battered meat in a sweet sauce. Vietnamese food is good but lacks the subtlety of the food we had almost daily at Flemington. There are no Hong Kong style BBQ houses and unfortunately Mediterranean style meat and bread combos, like kebabs, are nowhere to be seen.
Bill the Butcher. Can we fix it?....apparently not.
We had a rather comical trip out to Redmond and the famous Bill the Butcher. You see, butchers are something of a rarity here. They just don't exist, much like green grocers and fish mongers. They're all packed into supermarkets and packed in plastic. Since we were having people over for dinner we wanted to do a pork roast. Now in Australia if all else fails I know that Coles will bail me out, not so here. Even the biggest supermarkets don't have roasts. So we Bing-ed and found Bill the Butcher. A lavish establishment saying all the right things like free-range, organic and hormone free. We wandered in on Wednesday after work and were greeted with perhaps the saddest looking meat counter I have ever seen. A few steaks, some sausages, a whole lot of meat wrapped in plastic (at a butcher...really?) and about 1/2 a kilo of what they claimed was pork shoulder. It looked porky but try as I might I couldn't find skin... I'd never made pork roast without skin.
"Is that all you have in the way of pork?" I asked.
"Yes". Unperturbed I powered on.
"And do you ever get it with the skin on?" The men behind the counter seemed puzzle by this comment.
" Not unless we get the whole animal." Whaaaat...... how exactly do you get the meat otherwise???? I was truly puzzled, if they didn't get the whole animal, then what exactly were they doing calling themselves a butcher? They were basically selling pre-cut meat! I mean, you could order a whole goat for special holidays at the butcher in North Strathfield....a whole goat!
"We do have some excess skin.....but it's frozen."
"Errr....no thanks" and we high-tailed it out of there and went and go eat burgers...at least they are half-way decent!
The Aussie Pie Company
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The pie in all it's un-adorned glory!
and with lotsa tomato sauce.
So, when one of Nuwan's work mates mentioned the Aussie Pie Company we were excited. True, the last time I ate a pie in Australia might have been from the school canteen but that point seemed irrelevant. Here was Australian food, made by Australian people.....in Seattle.
We thought the 20 minute trek from the race location out to Burien was well worth the effort. In we went and we were immediately greeted with decor reminiscent of the corner milk bar, nice touch.
Behind the counter are silver warmers with over 10 different meat and veg pies. There's a sweet counter with Lamingtons and apple turnovers and on the left a shelf of imported goodies; Weetbix, Cottees cordial, pavlova magic, Vegemite and even passionfruit pulp!
Nuwan opted for a pie, I went for a sausage roll. We grabbed our loot, armed ourselves with sauce, plates and spoons and headed for the park across the road. They were both delicious. The sausage roll was full of good pork sausage (some of the ground meat here is very suspect) and flaky pastry, just a little burnt at the edges. The meat pie was oozy, packed full of more gravy than meat, as it should be. After trying some of Nuwan's pie I got food envy and decided I really wanted some. So it happened that in the space of 20 minutes we had to wander back into the pie shop to get me another meat pie and grab a couple of frozen ones for later. On good days they even have a meat pie and Bundy ginger beer combo.
Suffice it to say the frozen ones didn't last the day either!
It only took a trip to the other side of the world to figure out that Aussie meat pies really are something special!
We have met some people who've pointed us in the direction of
- good yum cha
- Din Tai Fung
and told us to head to Vancouver if we want real Asian food.
Until next time xoxox
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