We met my grandmother, Hiroe, at Ikina Sushi in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, down the street from an antique store where they had rescued one of the famous Donald Trump statues and put it next to their statue of Bigfoot. I had a rice bowl with fish, and the sauce from the eel enriched the rice and clashed with the flavor of pickled radish and cucumber. For dinner we went to a Mexican restaurant on the same block, where I had tamales with summer squash stuffed inside, thinly sliced, and an order of chapulines, the grasshoppers they sell on street corners in Oaxaca. The chapulines I’ve tried in Mexico taste like roasted nuts and it’s hard to even tell they’re insects; here, they looked very much like grasshoppers and were cooked with so much ancho chile that it seemed like they were overcompensating.
(Photo: Capitol Hill, Seattle.)
365 Days of Food 