What I Can Cook But Cannot Eat

08 Wednesday Jun 2022

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, Work, Youth

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Cooking, Food, IBS, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Life Changes, Omnivore, Remedies, Self-Reflection, Sleeplessness, Stress, Top Chef, Veganism, Work

Haagan-Dazs Belgian Chocolate Milkshake and My GI tract-if-I-drank-one-symbolism, June 8, 2022. (https://www.doordash.com & https://www.charlestonphysicians.com/gastroenterology/managing-ibs/). **Note: Sunday, August 31, 1997 at Union Station in DC was the last time I had one, and it delayed our bus trip back to Pittsburgh for more than two hours.**

My relationship with food has always been one of love, but with a heavy price. Off and on between October 1980 and May 1999, two things defined my time with food: the frequent lack of it, and my ability to cook and manipulate it. Besides having my mom as a guide, I think those 1,900 or so days with little to no food wherever I lived and whomever I lived with heavily influenced my cooking ambitions and chef-esque cooking skills.

While money has been tight at times in the years since, I have not personally confronted food insecurity or food access issues since the end of the twentieth century. Yet my ability to eat whatever I choose has declined from near-Hoover-vacuum levels of anything edible to a Matrix-level diet of rice krispies in water-infused electrolytes. My stomach has always been where stress and sickness decides to manifest. Even in my preteens, a milkshake at the wrong time or in combination with the wrong kind of food became a shitshake. I would sometimes be a few minutes late for class in graduate school (to the chagrin of my racist and ableist white professors) because of my GI (gastrointestinal) tract.

But there was nothing consistent about what I’ve known for more than 20 years to be my irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) until the week after my PhD graduation in 1997. After a week of travel, job interviews, graduation, and personal betrayal, my body was burned out along with my mind and spirit. I had stomach pains for four days, and could barely eat. For more than a year afterward, the only dairy I could handle was Lactaid. Nearly anything, including spaghetti with red sauce, could set off a wave of diarrhea, or days of constipation.

Once we moved to the DMV, and especially once I took my assistant director job at New Voices, I finally had a regular doctor at GW Hospital in DC. After a sigmoidoscopy and a colonoscopy in 2001, my internist diagnosed me with IBS. There was a wrinkle, though. There was no physical evidence for why I had IBS. No signs of serious acid reflux, no tapeworms or other parasites, no ulcers or tears in the intestines or colon. “Are you saying that my irritable bowel syndrome is psychosomatic?,” I remember asking. The doctor said, “No. Whatever’s going on, we can’t explain it with the tests we have.”

Stress, work travel, and lack of sleep were constant companions in the ’00s for me. And that meant popping Imodium pills, the occasional acidophilus and other probiotics, and regulating parts of my diet. I did colon cleanses, fruit fasts, full fasting, and tried a shift toward vegetarianism. All results were middling at best.

It took leaving the nonprofit world and becoming a consultant with part-time professoring for my IBS to calm down in 2008 and 2009. Working mostly from home also allowed me more time to cook. Especially to cook meals I hadn’t cooked or eaten since I was a teen, or to cook entirely new dishes and desserts. I learned how to make traditional and Silician-style pizzas, French bread, madeleines, and rabbit ragù. I reverted and started making grits and biscuits, beans and rice, and corned beef from a can. I tried out stew peas with goat and beef, chicken tikka masala, and chicken marsala.

With all this, by 2013, I realized organic foods didn’t mess up my stomach nearly as much. And, that tons of probiotics and acidophilus (at least 7 billion CFU per meal or 30 billion for the whole day) kept me regular and regulated. I was in the best GI tract health of my adult life, and it stayed that way for a while. My flare-ups were maybe a few times a month, and not every day like they had been before. Yay, me!

That is, until the second half of 2019, the months going into the pandemic. With me teaching a 60-percent full-time schedule at each of two universities (for 120% FT equivalent) and drafting an article once every two weeks as a freelancer, even working from home became stressful. My IBS became worse, but selectively so. Eggs, brown, organic, free-range, whatever, became problematic. So did spaghetti, as well as hamburgers, anything with pinto beans, kidney beans, any food beyond the mildly spicy (and sometimes that would go through me, too). Snickers in the daytime was bad, but a bar right after dinner and under 75 degrees Fahrenheit was okay. Egg whites from Trader Joe’s led to a fart here or a burp there, but organic liquid egg whites from Whole Foods easily sparked a flare-up. Salads for lunch were now flat-out forbidden, but a tiny one with dinner was fine. Ice cream with a brownie, blondie, or cookies, dairy or dairy-free, was also okay. Most delivered or picked-up food has been an experiment in pain and gas.

This back-and-forth with IBS only got worse with the pandemic. Plus, I am over 50. Not everything I ate in my teens and in my 20s should be in my stomach and intestines now. Some would say I should go completely vegan (keep in mind, about a fifth of my diet is already vegan, and if one cooks for meat eaters, it’s hard for an omnivore to not taste). But after making stew peas last week, even four kidney beans was enough to make my stomach grumble, and vegan or not, all of us (and yours truly, too) need protein.

If my IBS is mostly a combination of environmental factors (e.g., stress internal and external, sleeplessness, travel, work intensity) and my psychological profile, then what do I do now? Go see a hypnotist? Move to another part of the world with millet, sorghum, sugar beets, and other things my stomach can digest? As it stands now, about half the meals I make these days are for my wife, my son, and sometimes my dog, but I can no longer eat or even taste without consequence. And that is more frustrating than the IBS.

Intermittent Starvation

22 Sunday Mar 2020

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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COVID-19, Food, Food Security, Intermittent Fasting, Malnourishment, Pandemic, Preparation, Starvation

Empty fruit and vegetable section shelves, Asda store, London, UK, March 14, 2020. (Yui Mok/PA via AP; https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/mar/15/trump-tells-people-stop-hoarding-and-buy-normal-am/).

A fair number of people I know have gotten into this trend we collectively call intermittent fasting. It’s the idea that you reduce your caloric intake by either reducing you total number of meals per day or take a set of days to not eat at all. When combined with rest, sleep, and exercise, one can become healthier, lose weight, and roll one’s body back to the days of normal blood pressure and glucose numbers. In the somewhat Apocalyptic times in which we live, some have said that intermittent fasting may be the new normal. Especially if or when stores and supermarkets begin to run out of foodstuffs. We will see what we will see come May, June, and the summer.

In the department of limited food intake, I have years of experience. Between the fall of 1980 and the winter of 1999, there isn’t a year where I didn’t have to scramble for scraps. I unknowingly made the lack of food at 616 part of my escapism in those earlier years, especially in Peanuts Land, where I used empty styrofoam McDonald’s and Burger King containers to construct the eatery sections of my imaginary capital city. It was partly why I liked it when my father would show up every third Saturday between April 1979 and April 1981 to take me and my brother Darren out for a few hours or even the whole weekend, sober or drunk. It didn’t really matter to me. Being able to eat fast food was a godsend this time four decades ago. Arthur Treacher’s Chicken and Chips, Mickey D’s, Carvel’s soft-serve ice cream, Papaya’s hot dogs, Wakefield’s brownies and greasy-spoon diners. Once, I even ordered and ate three Big Macs in one sitting at the one-time McDonald’s on the Avenue in South Side Mount Vernon. I was ten in 1980! Ah, those were great days!

But those days came after many days of well-balanced but often meager food options that Mom provided. Chicken and dumplings, pinto beans or black-eyed peas with rice, pork neck bones, and corn bread, and cabbage, cabbage, cabbage! By the end of 1980, cereal was no longer a regular household staple, and snacks were a rarity. Heck, when Mom and my idiot stepfather Maurice separated for six months that October, he cleaned out weeks’ worth of pork chops, lamb shanks, chicken, ground beef, and steaks on his way out of our apartment.

Then, the Hebrew-Israelite years came, and with it, intermittent fasting. That is, with extreme urban poverty. With the start of middle school in September 1981 came days at a time where I didn’t eat or ate very little. Our conservative take on Judaism meant that we would all have to fast for three days prior to Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Passover. Since Darren and I weren’t adults, we were supposed to fruit and juice fast. That would have worked if there had been fruit juice and fruit in the house regularly! Our first Rosh Hashanah was the only time in those three years where I ate oranges, apples, grapes, and bananas for all three days. But with my family’s economic decline came days where I simply went to school and did not eat at all, upcoming high-holy day or otherwise.

So many days I watched my classmates eat full lunches while my stomach growled from drinking water. Pride and watching the older students clown others for being on free and reduced lunch kept me from picking up and filling out the application. And even if I hadn’t been raised to not expect handouts and to not see free-lunch as a sign of familial failure, the Hebrew-Israelite years complicated matters for me. Most Fridays at school, the cafeteria served grilled ham-and-cheese sandwiches with French fries.

It got way worse before it got better. From October 1981 through April 1984, we went between seven and 10 days every single month with little or no food at 616. After the 20th of any given month, I knew I’d miss meals, or it would be cabbage and corn bread or Great Northern beans and rice again. Keep in mind, Mom worked at Mount Vernon Hospital for most of that time as a dietary supervisor, so she worked around food while often hungry herself. One weekend in October 1982, all we had in the kitchen was some dried up cabbage, sugar, a little bit of flour, and a one-year-old box of Duncan Hines Devil’s Food cake mix. Things were so bad the summer and fall of 1982 that Mom was bringing home scraps from her job for us to eat. I got sick of days’ old Boston Creme Pie, hospital version.

Life improved slightly when Mom went on welfare after my late sister Sarai’s birth in 1983. But the food shortages continued into 1985, when Darren and I began working with my father regularly, and then began getting our own jobs. But while the malnourishment and starvation left me scarred, they also left me prepared for future crises that for many would have been calamities. Homelessness, malnourishment, and no money while at Pitt in 1988. Difficulties with rent, bills, and food in 1990 and 1991, when I graduated from Pitt. Summers looking for work and living off fumes in 1992, 1993, and 1997, when I was in grad school and after I finished my doctorate at Carnegie Mellon. The beginning of 1999, when me and soon-to-be-wife stretched $20 over ten days, eating makeshift gravy with instant mashed potatoes while teaching nearly every day for a week at Duquesne.

Maybe that explains why I once thought about becoming a chef while growing up. Maybe that’s why I took so quickly to cooking family-sized meals when I was 14. Maybe that’s the reason I made a point of cleaning off every plate of food I fixed or someone else put in front of me until I was 31. It’s certainly the reason behind my OCD around shopping, cooking, storing, and giving food, for myself, my family, and for others, for so many of my 50 years. It very well could explain my G-I tract issues and IBS for much of my adult life.

But with this COVID-19 pandemic could come food and other shortages. The land of endless plenty could have pockets of starvation if millions get sick and stay sick for too long. I have thought for years about buying a composite bow and some arrows with which I could shoot a deer in the neck. I already know I can do it, having killed two dozen mice and rats over the years — some with a broom handle, a hammer, and my bare hands. I have beheaded and gutted fish, chickens, and turkeys. I have eaten venison and rabbit stew before. Or, I could hop on down to Home Depot and buy some seeds to grow snap peas, green beans, maybe even squash or potatoes. We do have a back yard!

Maybe this is all overblown. Maybe this isn’t the Apocalypse. We still have electricity, cable, and wi-fi, after all. Yet the Romans still had gladiatorial games at the Coliseum during two years of siege and starvation at the Visigoths’ hands before it fell in 410 CE. Thousands and perhaps a few million could go without food, even if the power plants and Comcast and Verizon never shut down.

So, intermittent fasting may well work for many. As for me, I’ve tried it, and I still do it from time to time. But you cannot fast your way out of a crisis. You can hunt and grow your way out of one, though.

Thanks, Away From Home

27 Tuesday Nov 2018

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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American University, Away From Home, Beverly, Depression, Family, Financial Woes, Food, Friends, Grinding Poverty, hunger, Kindness of Strangers, Loneliness, Malnourishment, Melissa, Pitt, Ron Slater, Thanksgiving

Thank You — paying it forward, March 3, 2017. (Catlane/iStock; http://digital.vpr.net/)

Yet another Thanksgiving has come and gone. The holiday is problematic for so many reasons, between the erasure, cultural exploitation, and dehumanizing mythology of indigenous Americans and the climate-change-defying national pig-out that begins every late-November Thursday, and continues for weeks afterward, year after year. But the fact that the days off around Thanksgiving gives us worker bees time to spend with family, friends, and those we seriously like and love can’t be ignored.

Sure. At least for those of us who have such people in our lives with whom to share our time off from work, school, and life’s constant treadmill. My American University students reminded me of the allegedly normal ritual of returning home to eat and spend time with family, et al., this past week. Half of them contacted me to let me know they weren’t going to attend the two classes immediately before Thanksgiving, even after learning I wasn’t granting them an excused absence for the holiday week. All so that they could have a few extra days away from the stresses of higher education and the classroom. I envied them, just an iota, if only because they presumably had good reason to spend time with their families and loved ones. I also figured that not everyone in my class was going home to a welcoming environment, or really, going home at all.

“And this time, we didn’t forget the gravy” Looney Tunes “Chow Hound” episode of bullying, greed, and gluttony, originally aired June 16, 1951. (WB; http://tralfaz.blogspot.com/).

That last one was certainly the case for me during my student days. Growing up the way we grew up, in Mount Vernon, at 616, a good Thanksgiving was one where we had a regular meal to eat. Even before the Hebrew-Israelite years of 1981-84, our Thanksgivings weren’t seven-course eat-a-thons. We were lucky if my Uncle Sam came over to eat with us (which after 1978, was pretty rare), and we didn’t spend time around my Mom’s friends once we dived into being Black Jews and fell into grinding welfare poverty.

After I went off to the University of Pittsburgh in August 1987, I only came home to Mount Vernon and 616 one time for Thanksgiving, three months later. My Mom made the biggest Thanksgiving meal I’d seen her make since 1975. I remember mostly the mashed potatoes and gravy. But it wasn’t a family affair, not really. I was home mostly because I had grown used to the well-worn grooves of poverty, abuse, and adult-level responsibilities that had been my life since the fall of 1982. The food, while the first home-cooked meal I’d eaten in three months, was an escape from my normal attempts at escape.

Twelve months later, after six weeks of depression, getting over my Phyllis obsession, a semester of graduate school-like concentration, a summer of unemployment, a week of homelessness, and three months of financial woes and malnourishment, Thanksgiving 1988 had arrived. Between Ron Slater, Beverly, and finally having enough money to not worry about eating or bills for the first time in almost a year, it felt weird, only having gratitude as my companion for a few years.

But life got even weirder for me, as my friend Melissa had invited me to her father’s house for Thanksgiving. This was not a date of any kind, certainly not from my perspective. I think that Melissa sensed how rough my year had been, knew that I wasn’t going home to New York to see family, and did the Christian thing of looking after one’s neighbors. This even though things weren’t exactly great for her and her father at the time. Melissa’s father was an ailing contractor in his early sixties. I really don’t remember much about that Thanksgiving in terms of the food. I think there may have been dinner rolls or candied yams. What I do remember is the two-and-a-half hours I talked with Melissa and her father, about politics, the “Stillers,” Christianity, and Pitt. It was the most thankful holiday I’d ever experienced, and my first Thanksgiving seeing what Thanksgiving was like for family members who enjoyed each other’s company.

It was the first of seven straight Thanksgivings either spent with friends like Melissa, Howard, Kenny, the Gants and their families, or by myself. The “by myself” Thanksgiving was in 1990. It was a cold and rainy day, where I did nothing but watch football, made myself two double cheeseburgers, and found a nearly usable director’s chair outside a vintage furniture gallery in East Liberty. Even then, folks looked out for me. The next day, two of my older Swahili classmates swung by my apartment to bring me Thanksgiving leftovers. They brought me cornbread, dinner rolls, ham, turkey, mashed potatoes, dressing and stuffing, greens, and candied yams with marshmallows. I had tried to say no, but neither of the women would let me. It was really hard for me not to cry while being thankful for such generosity.

It seems like it’s been a lifetime since those naive and cynical days, where I didn’t trust anyone in my life. The bout with homelessness and the financial straits that followed changed my life in ways that I notice even today. Even with the years of working long hours and fighting for my career as a writer and an educator, I realize that I wouldn’t be here doing any of what I’m able to do today without the kindness of strangers and friends, the ability to weigh, sift, and analyze myself and my past or the sense that God had a purpose for me, a reason for living and being. Even after 30 years, I have this and so much else to be thankful for.

The Meaning of Chicken McNuggets

23 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Chicken McNuggets, Class of '87, Contaminated Food, Coping Strategies, Distractions, Food, Food Critic, Food Justice, Food Policy, Food Politics, General Foods, McDonald's, MVHS, Operation Opportunity, Pink Slime, Self-Discovery, Self-Reflection, Sweet and Sour Sauce, Vanilla Milkshake

McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets with Sweet and Sour Sauce, November 17, 2006. (The Food Pornographer via Flickr). In public domain.

I’ve found it amazing over the years how much my diet and palate has changed, and how my cooking has changed with it. Once upon a time, I thought that Burger King, Arthur Treacher’s, and (to go more local) Mount Vernon’s Papa Wong’s and Clover Donuts had the best food in the world. I knew no other way of preparing fish other than frying it in oil and coating it with a combination of flour and corn meal. And any meal that cost more than $10 — whether eating out or in buying the ingredients to make a meal for my 616 party-of-eight — was a real luxury.

By the summer of ’87 — the summer between the end of high school and the beginning of my college journey at Pitt — I was working for General Foods (now Kraft Foods) in Tarrytown, New York as part of the minority access program Operation Opportunity (the details are all in Boy @ The Window). After work, I often stopped in White Plains at or near The Galleria to switch buses, since it took two buses and a three-quarters-of-a-mile walk to get from 616 and Mount Vernon to the company’s testing facilities down the road from the Tappan Zee Bridge. I also stopped at The Galleria to avoid the hum-drum grind of poverty and chaos at home, to get something substantial to eat, to check out and/or buy the latest tune. And, to feel like a normal seventeen-year-old, and not the boy-man who always felt as if he was part of some epic struggle.

As I described it in Boy @ The Window:

And it was a heaven, a haven, a distraction, if only temporarily, from all of my terrors and fears. Of being permanently alone, of not being able to establish real, lasting friendships, of not being able to love, of only being able to evaluate myself through the eyes of women who saw me as a boring automaton. Not to mention, of having yet another incident with my idiot stepfather Maurice over my refusal to submit to him as “Dad.”

It was also really my first time on my own for more than a few hours without the crutch of high school and Humanities, without the constant noise of my younger siblings tearing up the apartment like it was the Daytona 500. So with every bite of those six orange-yellow McNuggets and every slurp of that fake vanilla milkshake, I savored my quieter mind. I may have looked to others as if I was woofing down the food faster than Scooby Doo and Shaggy in the middle of a food orgy. But for me, those five or six minutes lasted more like twenty, as if I was in deep meditation or watching a bird flap its wings in slow-motion.

Mechanically processed chicken, the key ingredient in McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets, pouring out into small tubs, October 5, 2010. (http://huffingtonpost.com).

Twenty seven years later, and I can barely stand the sight or smell of anything McDonald’s — or any fast food in general. Thank you, by the way, Eric Schlosser and your Fast Food Nation (2002) book for making my stomach churn with every fast-food smell my nose can detect! I even make my own pizzas most of the time now! I buy my son Noah and my wife (on occasion) Mickey D’s, mostly McNuggets, and lately, with milkshakes that apparently now contain some dairy-like substances. As for me, I do sometimes eat a couple of fries, but my near-middle-aged tongue and stomach limits my ability to push down the food.

My palate after thirty years of cooking and progressing from $5 spaghetti meals for eight to broiling sockeye salmon in olive oil with a from-scratch fettuccine dish is far more sophisticated now. I no longer can lose myself in food in order to de-stress from carrying the weight of my world. Cooking, however, has been my one of my cathartic exercises for the past twenty years. It’s sometimes even more of a remedy than writing. Too bad there was never any hemp in those McNuggets, though!

Clover Donuts and Papa Wong’s

07 Thursday Mar 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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Arson, Arthur Treacher's Fish & Chips, Carvel Ice Cream, changes, Chicken and Chips, Chocolate Cake Donuts, Clover Donuts, Community Changes, Food, Foodie, Glazed Donuts, Gramatan Avenue, Papa Wong's, Pork Egg Rolls, Poverty, quality of food, Quality of Life, Sue's Rendezvous, Suspicious Fires

Pork Egg Rolls (like the ones Papa Wong’s once made), Golden Gate Restaurant, Wyoming, MI, December 6, 2008. (stevendepolo via Flickr). In public domain.

Poverty influenced so much of my worldview in the years prior to finishing my doctorate. Including my taste buds. I’m sure that if I used my taste buds today to evaluate the Sicilian slices I used to eat from the pizza shop on East Lincoln, I’d throw it in trash and demand my money back. Yet I could say at thirteen — and say now at forty-three — some foods stand out more than others, foods that I haven’t been able to find anywhere else. In the case of these Mount Vernon/NYC foods, I really can’t go home again.

Eating at Papa Wong’s restaurant on Gramatan Avenue was a real treat for me even at seven or eight. They had great egg rolls, pork, shrimp and chicken fried rice. I loved the place. It smelled the way I thought a Chinese restaurant ought to smell. Ginger, sesame, soy, onions, scallions and garlic. It’s too bad the restaurant burned down suspiciously in ’82, with nothing to replace it with but a parking lot for nearly a decade afterward. The circumstances behind the fire — as with so many on Gramatan and South 4th Avenue in the ’81-’84 period — remain suspicious to this day.

There was also good eating for me at Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips on Prospect and Park before it closed down that corner for two years at the end of ’82. I loved their crispy chicken medallions with the chips — awesome! Carvel’s Ice Cream shop a block west on Prospect was also a good place to eat, even if the customer service sucked more times than not. I think I drove myself to lactose intolerance about five years early because of that place. Man, I miss those chocolate-on-vanilla ice cream sandwiches!

Chocolate Honey Dip Donuts (not quite like the ones Clover Donuts used to make), March 6, 2013. (http://honeydewdonuts.com).

But nothing for my precious few dollars topped Clover Donuts. If you could take a Krispy Kreme glazed and genetically cross it with a Dunkin Donuts glazed, you’d end up with the best glazed donut ever! And that’s exactly what Clover Donuts sold. Not to mention those juicy, grilled and amazing Sabrett Hot Dogs. It was all a “kick in da head” for me growing up. On almost every visit I made to Mount Vernon after I went to the University of Pittsburgh, I made a stop there for a glazed donut, their nugget-y yet soft chocolate glazed donuts, and a hot dog. I might’ve not liked many things about Mount Vernon, but Clover Donuts was one thing I really enjoyed.

By the time I hit my mid-teens, though, I realized that Mount Vernon’s food had changed, and not for the better. Papa Wong’s was long gone, and so was Arthur Treacher’s. My home life at 616 meant that most of my shopping time was spent in Pelham at C-Town or in one of their inferior eateries. The pizzerias made slices that varied from absolutely sucks to pretty good, but were common and unimaginative enough that they blended together for me. At Mount Vernon High School, the deli in nearby Chester Heights easily surpassed anything I’d eaten sandwich-wise outside of the city.

Speaking of, going down to 241st in the Bronx, and then to Manhattan, changed my view of food for good. My years working with Jimme and Darren in Midtown, on the Upper East and Upper West Side, near Spanish Harlem on 90th and around Lincoln Center introduced me to great delis and bodegas. The best deli food I ever had from one at the crossroads between Broadway and Columbus between 65 and 66th Street, across from Lincoln Center. The smell of pastrami sizzling on the grill, the thick cuts of turkey and corned beef, the interracializing of cookies, my first taste of a blondie. It all happened there for me in ’84 and ’85, and sorry to say, I was spoiled by that food. Unlike the food I find outside of my kitchen these days (see my post “Washington, DC – Where Bad Food Abounds (DC/MD/VA)” from last month).

Sue’s Rendezvous, a strip club a block away from where Papa Wong’s used to be, Mount Vernon, NY, March 6, 2013. (http;//twitter.com).

It’s safe to say that these experiences had as much of an influence on what I eat and what I like to cook as growing up with a great cook in my mother at 616. I’d love to add Clover Donuts’ glazed donut and chocolate cake donut recipes to my repertoire. Not to mention those super-crispy pork egg rolls from Papa Wong’s. I loved it all, and I miss them all as well.

Washington, DC – Where Bad Food Abounds (DC/MD/VA)

20 Wednesday Feb 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Pop Culture, Youth

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Bad Food, Carnegie Mellon University, Cuisine, DC Area, DC/MD/VA, Dessert, Eateries, Food, Food Critic, Food Reviews, Foodie, Hollywood East Cafe, Mineo's Pizza Shop (Pittsburgh), Pitt, Pittsburgh, Pizza, quality of food, Quality of Life, Quality of Meat, Restaurant Reviews, Restaurants, Review, The DMV, University of Pittsburgh, Washington DC, Whole Foods, Whole Foods Pizza

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I’ve always been a bit of a food snob. Thanks in no small part to a mother who could cook Southern-style food well enough to open her own restaurant (well, thirty years ago, anyway), as well as nearly three decades’ worth of experience in the kitchen myself (see my post “Top Cook” from May ’09 for more). After fourteen total years of living in the DC area (or “the DMV,” as some dummies and promoters say these days), I can safely say that the food in this town — from Rockville and Silver Spring, to Suitland and College Park, from Alexandria and Falls Church, to all eight of DC’s wards — sucks, sucks, sucks. There’s no one who can convince me otherwise.

I’ve tried. I really have. Over the years, I’ve been to restaurants near my former jobs in Dupont Circle, on K Street, in Old Town Alexandria, Adams Morgan, Foggy Bottom, U Street and Georgetown. On the recommendations of friends, I’ve eaten at dozens of joints, fine eateries and diners, pizzerias and bars, crab shacks and cafés. Here’s my list of the places I’d recommend to my best friends as places to enjoy a good meal or dessert: Ruth’s Chris Steak House (Dupont Circle), Cheesecake Factory (Alexandria and Friendship Heights) and Original Pancakes (Rockville Pike). That’s it. Unfortunately, they’re all national chains and you pay through the nose for the food at all of them. As much as I love strip steaks and chocolate cheesecake, who can afford to eat like that every day?

Mineo’s Pizza, Pittsburgh, PA, circa 2010, February 20, 2013. (http://flickr.com). Oh, how I’ve missed thee!

Otherwise, the food here is both overpriced and prepared as if my nine-year-old son was the master chef. I find it appalling that there are restaurants (including one that calls itself a “diner”) that charge $10 and $12 for a burger! What? Are they using Kobe beef flown in from Kobe, Japan or something?

You can’t even find good pizza in this area. We’re talking pizza, folks! My latest attempts at finding even decent pizza have been Pete’s Apizza (New Haven-style that’s overcooked, even for New Haven-style) on Wisconsin in DC and — get this — Whole Foods. At least at Whole Foods, they get the sauce right — but only the sauce! I’ve officially given up on this too. The best pizzas I’ve had here over the past five years are the ones I’ve made from scratch and put in the oven on my own stone implement.

If you think I’m being hard on DC’s food, understand this. For those of you who knew me when I was at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon, I used to complain about Pittsburgh’s food. That was, until I finished graduate school, and then had two and a half years (’96-’99) to truly explore the city’s cuisine. Spring Garden for Chinese (Squirrel Hill), Pasta Piatta for Italian (Shadyside), Max & Erma’s for Americana, Rosebud’s for true old New York-style deli sandwiches — not that crap Primanti Bros. makes (Downtown, or Dahntahn), Gullifty’s for dessert and Mineo’s for pizza — especially their Sicilian slices (again, Squirrel Hill). Now, some of these eateries no longer exist. What I can tell you, though, is that while typing the previous sentence, my stomach began to growl wildly.

Hollywood East Cafe, circa 2002 and 2012, from hole-in-the-wall to the middle of a mall (how bigger isn’t always better), Wheaton, MD, February 20, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins).

That’s friggin’ Pittsburgh, not exactly a hotbed of haute cuisine. Here in the DMV, even when I’ve found a good place for food, it’s turned out to be a one-time thing. Hollywood East Cafe, the best Chinese/Asian cuisine I’ve had on this side of the Potomac, has changed so much since ’08 that I’ve bought my own wok and traditional steamer to make my own stir-frys and steamed rice. Cake Love’s (or Cake Loathe, as I call it these days) desserts were always icing top-heavy. Now, I could used them as mud bricks to build a sugary-smelling shantytown in Silver Spring and off U Street. Sweet Georgia Brown’s is a sour place of Southern style fused with soul-less additions, and Hogate’s (now closed) was always over-hyped, even when it did have above-average seafood.

Even the raw materials for the food that we’re supposed to prepare at home tend to suck and cost more than they’re worth. Whole Foods’ chickens and chicken parts — organic and free range as they are — look like they’ve been on a Slim-Fast diet their whole lives. They and the kosher butchers I occasionally shop price their beef as if they slaughter a cow one at a time, out behind their stores. The vegan alternatives are such that one would think Whole Foods was growing tofu cultures in a lab above the shopping area, as much as half a pound of vegan chicken costs!

I need another outlet for the foodie in me, and soon. My food can’t continue to be the only best food I can eat, because that means ever more time in the kitchen, and maybe even getting a permit to start slaughtering my own meat. Perhaps, maybe, Baltimore? My suspicion is, not much better, but I’m willing to give then a try.

Trick or Trick

31 Monday Oct 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, race, Religion, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, A.B. Davis Middle School, Clear View School, Con Edison, Fasting, Food, Grilled Ham & Cheese Sandwich, Halloween, Hebrew-Israelites, Humanities, Ice Cream Sandwich, Maurice Washington, Mount Vernon New York, Poverty, The Clearview School

Charlie Brown fooled by Lucy and the football, again, October 30, 2011. (http://www.flickr.com).

I’ve never really liked Halloween. Probably because most of my Octobers growing up in Mount Vernon, New York were pretty horrible ones. The worst of those late Octobers were in the early 80s, starting in ’81.

That year, Halloween was a forbidden holiday in my life anyway. But the trick was on me. On a day just before Halloween, my day’s meal consisted of an ice cream sandwich as hard as a rock. The lunch at A.B. Davis Middle School that Friday — as it was most Fridays back then — was a grilled ham and cheese sandwich with fries, not exactly a Hebrew-Israelite’s diet. It was also about thirty degrees outside and partly cloudy, unusually cold for early fall in New York. So I stood near the steps leading down to the back of Davis, which led to the athletic field below. The field had turned a dirty yellow-green, the color of mid-fall. It matched how I felt about my life on that day.

The only reason I even had a rock-hard ice cream sandwich for lunch was because I’d won one of our seventh grade social studies teacher Mr. Court’s bets. He’d made an incorrect historical assertion in class, and I caught it, collecting a quarter from him that morning. Still, I learned, fully and truly for the first time, how

A Single Vanilla Ice Cream Sandwich, 1994. (Renee Comet/National Cancer Institute). In public domain.

poor me and my family had become, all while bitterly jamming the ice cream sandwich down my throat. So much for discovering my inner Hebrew-Israelite self through fasting and eating kosher foods!

I very quickly grew to hate hearing the words Hebrew-Israelite, especially since I’d never been to a traditional synagogue, much less Israel, Palestine, or even Ethiopia. Our Hebrew-Israelite ways had left us with little to eat when I was at home. There was a benefit to all of this. It made the fasting part of fasting and prayer easier. Not easy, just easier. My first Yom Kippur ceremony was difficult. We fasted on fruit for three days, and I barely made it through school each of those days. I almost passed out from the lack of food.

My older brother Darren, meanwhile, had decided that “the day of atonement” and all things Torah didn’t include his stomach. By the end of October, I would watch him take his kufi off as he boarded his bus for The Clear View School (see “About My Brother” from December ’07). I caught Darren walking near our apartment building with the last of a Hostess’ Apple Pie and its wrapper during Yom Kipper. He had snuck around the building to eat his contraband. What made this transgression worse was that Hostess used lard to create its desserts. And Darren, once caught, just stared at me and smiled.

My Mom was too busy and tired for me to think about complaining to her about this or about the issues I faced during my first days of Humanities. For more than three years, my Mom’s income had dropped so much compared to rising food and energy prices that we didn’t have food in the house for the last ten days of every month. Sometimes we didn’t have heat either, because we were usually two or three weeks behind on

Anthracite coal (like the lump of coal that was my life in '81), March 7, 2007. (United States Geological Survey). In public domain.

the Con Edison bill. I also knew that we were consistently behind on rent. I felt as isolated as a kidnapped tweener chained to a radiator in a walled-off-window basement.

Lack of food and heat at home weren’t the only problems. My Mom had popped out two of my younger brothers in the previous three years. We lived at 616 in a 1,200 square-foot, two bedroom and one bathroom apartment, so overcrowding had become an issue. Me and Darren were sharing a bedroom with our two siblings.

Not only did I start to believe that my then idiot stepfather Maurice Washington — oops, Judah ben Israel — had colluded with his version of God to play a cruel trick on my mother and my family. Not only did it finally dawn on me that we had slid into poverty somewhere between beginning on ’79 and Halloween ’81. But I knew that we were in a family crisis, financial, material and spiritual. And there was nothing, absolutely nothing, I knew to do about it. Not even asking for candy would’ve helped.