World Spice Merchants, Seattle

A trip to World Spice Merchants has become a mainstay of our visits to Seattle. (I always remember it as Spice World. Isn't it amazing how much cheesier it sounds that way?) It's a wonderful little shop a street level down from Pike Place market. We go mostly to get a ton of chili powder, one ingredient that eludes us in Tokyo. I was extra excited to go this time, though, because somehow my brother had never been in almost a decade in Seattle. He's a fantastic cook and I had a feeling he'd find a lot to love at the spice shop. He went straight to the rows of jars with Chinese spices and showed Emily one that he hasn't found since he lived in Tang Shan. Success! Jim was opening and sniffing the variety of chili powders, and I checked out the loose tea downstairs. (And the veggies and spice dips they'd laid out. I was hungry.) By the time we left, we had a brown paper bag packed solid with vacuum-sealed pouches of seasoned salts, spice blends and chili mixes. How did that dense parcel get waved through airport security while my travel-size Listerine got a full interrogation?