Comfort Food & Old Houses

We ate at Blue Nile the other day.  We don't eat out much, and neither of us had ever been there.  Ethiopian cuisine, which turns out to be pretty much all crock pot cooking.  We had the sampler, about fifteen things, all but three vegetarian.

They were all things that you'd put in a pot at the corner of the coals in your fire pit and leave to go work in the fields or whatever.  Slow cooker food, served with a delicious, spongy, slightly fermented bread that serves as utensil and accompaniment to everything.


The French, I've heard, think every dish should have a sauce or condiment, and apparently the Ethiopians agree and take out the middleman by cooking the dish in the sauce.

After, Corinna wanted to go to the Halal market and get some lamb to stew, inspired by the meal.  While there, we met Ken Sonnensheim, the organizer of Bike 4 the Brain, who was out marking routes;  we also met a girl named Stacy I can't swear wasn't selling herself on the same sidewalk as men who would have her stoned to death for showing too much face.

And we saw this awesome old house, painstakingly restored, around the corner from the Halal market.

Then, on the way home the other night, I noticed the Scarritt House in Westport.  I assume this is the same Scarritt the 'Scarritt Renaissance' near the Halal Market was named for, but I'm not sure.  I'll bet the houses are about the same age, antediluvian but barely.  It's not like there was much to Kansas City at the time of the Civil War, right?