A Few Food Stops for Ballard Tourists
"Apples," courtesy of Seattlest Flickr Pool member swpars, illustrates that if you want choices, Pike Place Market has got you covered.
We were in the market for whatever looked good to eat. We were on the way to the Ballard Locks and looking for just a little something fresh and fruity to sustain us. As was our wont, we bought more than our stomachs could stomach at once.
The cutesy sign to Top Banana (15th and 65th) pulled us into their parking lot. After all, we were tourists for the day and it looked very native. Unique. Browsing the aisles, we were a little disappointed at first. Only six varieties of apples, here, at a Northwest fruit stand? And the cheapest was the $1.89 Golden Delicious. But wait: we spotted organic Fuji apples for only $1 per pound, which immediately turned our disappointment into enthusiasm.
We loved the look of the organic purple spring onions and were imagining the colorful plates we could create, but at $2.59, we thought them a little too expensive. Instead, we bagged ourselves honey mangos ($1 each) and organic white peaches ($1.59). Surely we were not going to munch on spring onions, anyway. However, we did grab a Tall Grass baguette ($4.50), delivered fresh every day to the market, from the basket on the counter which looked rustic and wheaty.
Now we were perfectly set to meander the streets and locks of Ballard, but the investigation of one shop propelled us into another with an "I wonder what they have..." and so we had hardly driven a block before we stopped at the Ballard Market (1400 NW 56th Street). Their Fujis were $1.98 and their organic white peaches $3.98; we were pleased with our Top Banana bargains.
We know that scallions are not quite the same thing as organic purple spring onions, but our taste buds can’t tell the difference. Our wallet, though, can, and it had convinced us that the green looks just as nice as the purple atop a salad. The Market’s scallions were $.98 each, and we bagged a few bunches.
We ogled their huge selection of mushrooms: beech, brown, oyster, maitake, and enoki, not to mention portabello and shitake. We began to pack our basket, ignoring our mushroom-hating friend who claimed we had bad taste buds. What were we going to do with all of these? We could certainly pair some nicely with bok choy ($1.98). As for the other goodies, we could always take another trip to a store to find a perfect pairing.
