A Second Look: Food and Holidays

Join Remie and Debbie as they rerelease the episode of "Food and Holidays" with Lockdown 2 Legacy's  first Guest, Remie's long time friend, Joe. We unravel the fascinating world of prison holiday traditions, the ingenious ways inmates craft meals from limited resources, like making cheesecake and fudge from commissary items. Cooking behind bars is not just about survival; it's a shared experience, an art form, and a testament to human ingenuity. We also touch on the importance of acknowledging and respecting different holidays and cultures, with a special focus on our own experiences of celebrating Kwanzaa. Along the way, we delve into our personal journeys of uncovering our African roots through DNA testing, providing a fresh perspective on the importance of recognizing one's roots and heritage.

But the story would be incomplete without the hardships. We delve into the issues of dealing with limited resources, especially during the holidays, and the struggles to make phone calls home amidst the festive preparations. We also highlight the community's hustle, and how the prison family comes together to support each other. So, come and get an insider's view of what holiday season looks like from within prison walls, where every sprinkle of joy counts and every shared meal is a celebration.

Chapters

• 0:19 Exploring Prison Life and Holiday Celebrations
• 9:27 Holidays in Prison
• 16:20 Holidays and Cooking in Prison
• 26:38 Hustles in Prison Cooking
• 41:18 Creative Cooking Techniques in Prison
• 50:42 Making Meals and Drinks in Prison
• 59:41 Cooking and Sharing Meals in Prison
• 1:10:18 Cooking in Prison With Exotic Ingredients
• 1:23:53 Cheesecake and Fudge Making in Prison
• 1:31:28 Challenges of Limited Resources in Prison
• 1:40:11 Surviving in Prison, Supporting Each Other

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:19

Welcome to Lockdown the Legacy stories from the inside out. I'm your host, remy Jones.

Speaker 2 0:25

And I'm co-host Debbie Jones. We are a husband and wife team here to bring you the real life stories, experiences and questions around the American criminal justice system. We do advise discretion with this podcast. I think we should put that out there first and foremost. Yes, we are going to talk about experiences that happen inside the prison system, outside of prison systems. We will use language that might be offensive, but we intend to keep it real. And if that's not for you, we totally understand, but please do what's best for your listening ears.

Speaker 1 0:56

Oh, we're about to keep it real, son. Our goal of this podcast is to share the inside realities of the American prison and criminal justice system, from pre-charges all the way to post-release, from the voices of those who've experienced it firsthand, including me.

Speaker 2 1:12

That's right, we're going to get into it Everybody.

Speaker 1 1:31

Welcome back to another episode of Lockdown the Legacy, and I'm your host, Remy Jones.

Speaker 2 1:38

And I'm your host, Debbie Jones.

Speaker 1 1:41

What up? Today is a very special day for a lot of people around the world because today is turkey day, also known as Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving to all our listeners.

Speaker 2 1:55

I think it's just happy Thanksgiving to those in America, not around the world, but I mean other people what if they're?

Speaker 1 2:02

Americans around the world.

Speaker 2 2:04

No, I just. I just meant, it's not a global, not a global holiday.

Speaker 1 2:08

I know that, See I actually got to, maybe look stupid from all of our. Not so millions of listeners, but one day, right, Right, Right. Anyway, happy Thanksgiving to all those who celebrated Otherwise any other holidays that you might be observing right now. Happy holidays.

Speaker 2 2:26

Yeah, I just read an article about the term happy holidays and just reminding folks to not be offended by saying happy holidays, because there are like 140 different holidays that have happened between October and the end of January, so I think it's a good reminder. That doesn't necessarily matter what you celebrate being greeted with something during the holiday season is special in and of itself. So even if it's not a thing you celebrate, hearing that greeting means somebody's taking time out to say something to you, and that's always nice.

Speaker 1 3:05

Yeah, I mean to be offended by somebody saying happy holidays is like basically you're saying I don't like anybody who's not like me. I mean even being like if you were to say all my friends are Americans, all my friends are white, or all my friends are black, or like even within that specific demographic there are a lot of varieties of faith and of just downright culture.

Speaker 2 3:32

Oh, yeah, there's so much going on. There's Diwali a week, two weeks ago. I'm sorry it depends. You're listening at a different time than we're recording and so the timeline is wonky. But happy belated Diwali to those who celebrate that. It's such a beautiful holiday. I was doing some reading on that. There are just so many that I don't know very much about, and so I'm trying really hard to diversify my understanding of cultural celebrations. We're going to do that a little bit this year, yeah.

Speaker 1 4:00

Of course I'm thinking we're not celebrating Christmas this year, we're going to do Kwanzaa. There's a lot that I want to teach my children, and that's the main focus. I personally myself don't really celebrate a lot of holidays. I just don't like the commercialized holidays. Christmas is mostly in the mainstream. It's like lost the whole family aspect. Thanksgiving, even though it's like the biggest time of year when people come together, it seems like it's so commercialized we're just forced to get out there and buy stuff.

Speaker 2 4:35

It's also very much about the food. We know folks close to us who struggle with their relationship with food and eating and everything, To put so much. I don't know, emphasis on that component of the holiday rather than the time together. It doesn't really fit our family structure. Kwanzaa is something we've talked about for a couple of years. We both identify as black individuals. We did our 23,. Was it 23? And me? Is that the brand?

Speaker 1 5:04

we used yeah, no, we actually did ancestrycom.

Speaker 2 5:07

Well, who did we do our little swabs through? Was that an ancestry?

Speaker 3 5:10

I thought it was through a different, like a DNA kit.

Speaker 2 5:13

Anyway, we did our little DNA swabs and found out that both of us have African roots. Mine are mostly Nigeria, Mine too. Yours are Nigeria also.

Speaker 1 5:24

We're probably related.

Speaker 2 5:28

I thought our percentages were different.

Speaker 1 5:30

I thought there was like Ghanaian.

Speaker 2 5:32

There was some Ghana and then I don't have my phone.

Speaker 1 5:34

I would definitely show you.

Speaker 2 5:36

The map. Yeah, we got to look at our map again In Cameroon. That came up on mine.

Speaker 1 5:40

We had Morocco.

Speaker 2 5:42

So we just had we're, you know.

Speaker 1 5:45

I had a lot of stuff I didn't expect. Yeah, me too Like as far as I know, like growing up everybody was like, you know, I got Irish, my grandad's Irish and I got Native American, you know, and my family from Mississippi on my dad's side, that's really all I know. On my grandma, my mom's side, it was like we come from like North Carolina and Florida and stuff Never really ventured outside of like prior to America.

Speaker 2 6:13

Well, and I am a child of transracial adoption. So you know, my upbringing, while amazing, wasn't necessarily tied to this black identity, and so it was important for me, I think, to figure out where that is, because black can be a lot of things. I mean there are, I mean, jamaicans and Haitians and all kinds of different black cultures, and so I wanted to know if that was actually rooted in Africa or otherwise. So, yeah, we decided we're going to do Kwanzaa.

Speaker 1 6:45

Yeah.

Speaker 2 6:45

Kwanzaa is an African holiday and it's not religious, but it celebrates African culture, and so we're going to kind of lean into that this year and learn something new.

Speaker 1 6:55

Yeah, well, I would like to do it more than one year, just to you know, keep learning. So that's us. That's what's going on. Yeah, maybe you ran a 5K today.

Speaker 2 7:08

I did Well. Yes, we're recording on Thanksgiving, so that's kind of been a tradition. It's 2019 for me, it's running a 5K, so it killed me. I've not been a runner for a long time. I'm trying to be a runner again, so it was a that was a really difficult one, but got it done.

Speaker 1 7:30

I think I could have done a 5K.

Speaker 2 7:32

Yeah.

Speaker 1 7:33

No, actually I don't. I think I could do the walk run. I don't think I could run it straight anymore.

Speaker 2 7:38

I didn't run it straight today either. I took some breaks, had to walk a little bit, but I think getting out there is the important part. So, yeah, did my little 5K, got that out the way, tried to do some more running. I like to run in the cold, so this is kind of coming into my running season.

Speaker 1 7:55

Boo.

Speaker 2 7:56

Yeah, you're a tropical baby. You don't like the.

Speaker 1 7:59

If it's anything below 70, you can go ahead and count me in for a season, like I'm done. It's been 73 days in a row. I better go and pull the clothes out of the cross base. Call all my friends, tell them I love them. I've been running for the day for a year. I just rode a motorcycle to work like three days ago in the cold rain at like 3 AM.

Speaker 2 8:25

So More importantly, it was mine which I love.

Speaker 1 8:31

Yeah, it had three wheels and I did you know whatever.

Speaker 2 8:34

I love it. I love that you took it because it's more stable in the weather.

Speaker 1 8:39

Yeah, okay.

Speaker 2 8:41

But you did it in the rain. It's only you were stable to a rookie. You rode it in the rain to work.

Holidays in Prison

Speaker 1 8:50

Did I ever tell you about the time when I lived up in Akron and I rode my motorcycle down to Canton because it was like a 30% chance of rain? I was like nah, nah, 30%, man, there you go rain. And I rode down there and it was like a full on thunderstorm. Like I was helping my mom with some housework and I saw like, oh crap, I got to go. Man, like as soon as I hit the highway it was like torrential rain. And by the time I got back I stood up on my motorcycle like after I stopped and just water just gushed down my pants. Like it looked like a rain spot, like a gutter spot. It just gushed down my pale legs. That was. That was hilarious. Anyway, off topic, Back on target.

Speaker 2 9:30

We're started about holidays. We're keeping with holidays. It is, I think it's a spectrum of experiences for those who are incarcerated, as well as their families. Right, it is people celebrating different ways. I think the theme that I hear the most often is people just try to get through it as best they can. Holidays can be hard, and so people try to find ways to come together. Everybody's going to share. We're going to come together and make a meal, but last year you did a really great episode with your friend Joe.

Speaker 1 10:13

Yes, Unfortunately that was before we got our sound together and it was kind of crappy recording, but I still wanted to like reshare that because it was a really good episode. Actually, it was one of the episodes that we got the most feedback positive feedback on, prior to, of course, the summer legacy series. Yeah so that was really good. Thanks for all the feedback.

Speaker 2 10:38

What I love about this episode is I think this is where you get a lot of questions. Still, People are always asking like how do you make food in prison? How do you cook? How do you make a feast? How do you make wine? How do you like? Those are questions that come up really frequently and I love how you and Joe talk about it in the episode.

Speaker 1 11:02

Yeah, I actually thought about this just a few hours ago. So we actually just got back from dinner. We decided we're not cooking this year, we're kid lists. This year, all the kids decided to go to other family members for Thanksgiving. So we just went out, had a nice meal for two, but as I was looking down on my plate, I just thought, like damn, I'll come a long way from those prison plates, because you get that tray and it's like, oh man, they gave a sweet cornbread and it's like a two by two square, two by two inches. They give you like a half an inch slice of apple, I mean of a pumpkin pie or sweet potato pie, and then the turkeys just rubbed me.

Speaker 1 11:49

But anyway, the thing is, though, like if you were fortunate enough, if you listened to our last episode, one of the things that Warren said was like in prison, those people become like your family, because, I mean, your family is there kind of in theory, you know, hopefully to keep you strong, but on the inside it's like. These are the people you eat, sleep next to, like you know, you eat with them, you break bread with them, you, they entertain you, they console you when stuff goes wrong. So, when the holidays come around, like Debbie said, it's really like touchy. You know, most people try not to think about what's going on on the outside. If you do, you're like run to the phone, call home, talk to everybody and then you just put it down and walk away, you know.

Speaker 1 12:41

But one of the great things that I kind of liked, because it was a real sense of community, like it, it's not really a lot of drama on the inside when it comes to like Thanksgiving. It's really like soon as the doors open, soon as your cell opens or soon as a count clears and you're able to move, like there is a mass flight to the microwaves, like, and it can be, you know, like when I was in minimum security, I think there were three, four microwaves in the dorm and so, like on each microwave it was like six, seven people in line, like yo I'm next, I put my bag behind his like, you know, and people were going about the day and they'll just come back and check in, but there was some like culinary masterpieces created in there.

Speaker 2 13:33

Yeah, slowly from a microwave.

Speaker 1 13:35

Slowly from the microwave, you know hot water and Tupperware. Tupperware, microwave. You know, and I mean it's. However, you're only limited by how creative you can get. You know, if you can think outside the box, be a critical thinker, problem solver like there's no end. I just saw Jeremy. He was the first episode of the summer legacy series. He just made a post on Facebook that he made a taffy with his son.

Speaker 2 14:04

Yeah, prison taffy.

Speaker 1 14:05

Yeah, and that's one of the things that people do in there. You know they make taffy to sell it. You know it's one of the hustles. So I mean, jeremy used to make me cheesecakes in there you love cheesecakes. I used to pay him to make me cheesecakes and you know.

Speaker 2 14:21

In the microwave huh.

Speaker 1 14:22

Yeah, it's crazy.

Speaker 2 14:25

I love that.

Speaker 1 14:26

And anything that you needed to make where it's like you needed to. You know, put it in the refrigerator or something like people would just get like a big bag of ice. They would insulate like a cleaned out trash can and they would put it in there and put a little ice around it and fold the towel over. So it's like man, only limited by your creativity.

Speaker 2 14:48

It's always really impressive to me to hear you tell these stories, which is why I think this episode is great, as you and Joe are both home and you're doing really amazing things and it's been several years that you have had these experiences, but to get to recall them together, especially since you cooked together, I think that's what the episode is about. It's what the holidays are about for incarcerated folks, and I'm excited to re-release this episode because someone asked us you know, this just came up recently about like, what do the holidays look like? And we're like we have a really great episode about that, so why fix what's not broken? Let's put it back out.

Speaker 1 15:27

Yeah, I'm glad to put it back out there. There was a lot of good stuff in it, and so I just hope that you guys enjoy it again.

Speaker 2 15:40

It's good for a re-listen on the take-through and if you've listened to it before, my ask is that you listen to it and then post some questions to us. I think that Joe would love to come back and do some Q&A and we would love to do kind of like a follow-up of like, what were people's thoughts about this?

Holidays and Cooking in Prison

Speaker 1 15:59

Yeah, and you know that episode was just me and Joe. Right, there's one, it wasn't live, you know. So it wasn't like we could have actual questions being posed to us that we could answer. So if you got questions, more questions, and we didn't touch on it, like go ahead. Like Debbie said, man, shoot that message. If you got more experiences like some of you may have been incarcerated yourselves and you got something you want to chime in and throw in too, like feel free. And if you want to be a guest, feel free to hit me up for that too.

Speaker 2 16:33

Yeah, I'm curious and hopefully we can find somebody to talk about this soon. I know we've been talking about this for a little while, but I would love to have someone from a women's prison come and talk about their experiences, particularly during the holidays, because I wonder if that, I wonder if holidays hit differently, I wonder if they hit the same and then like, what does breaking bread together and community look like in a women's prison versus, you know, men's prison? So, that's my question.

Speaker 1 17:01

You know, I know in men's prison it's more like a brotherhood. But the only the only like insight into women's prison I have is like I had one pen pal that was in a marriage room, women's correctional, and then you know stuff like 60 days in and stuff like that. But my thing is it's, in my mind, more of a maternal type group. I don't know if it's a sisterhood or if it's more maternal. So if you know somebody man, please feel free to tag him on Facebook, let me know. I think I'll have to throw a post out there, yeah.

Speaker 2 17:40

I would really love that perspective, especially as we enter this time of year, because, like I said, there's like hundreds of holidays that are happening every day through the end of the year and through the beginning of the new year, and I'm sure people are experienced. I mean, I know that people who aren't in incarcerated settings experience all those things differently. So I have to imagine it's a spectrum during incarceration too, whether it's your first holiday season away from home or your 30th season away from home. I feel like both of those ends are difficult in their own regard, you know. So anyway, all of that to say happy holidays. You know what's the saying, what's the thing I always say in the holiday season? I haven't said it in a whole year. What do I usually say? Marry everything and happy always. That's it.

Speaker 1 18:31

I was never going to guess that. I was never.

Speaker 2 18:35

Marry everything and happy always this holiday season. Whatever you celebrate or don't celebrate, however you get through lockdown to legacy wishes you well, nothing but the best.

Speaker 1 18:51

For sure. Now, everybody, stop what you're doing. Remember now that junk in the background and check out this interview with Joe. All right, so welcome back to another episode. As promised, I got my first guess here. This is my long friend Joe. How's it going, man? It's good. Glad to see you again, man. That's our first time actually seeing each other in the four five years, five years, yeah, almost coming up. Five years, so when'd you get?

Speaker 3 19:32

out March of 2018. It was like a month or two before you, I think.

Speaker 1 19:39

Oh snap, yeah, because I got out on May, so it is about that five year mark.

Speaker 3 19:44

Yeah, I got my NMPRCs coming up in March. Tell with the line all this time.

Speaker 1 19:53

Sweet man. I don't know who's listening. I don't know if it was a mistake or not, but I actually got off PRC in January this year, which was early because they said it was mandatory five years, and somehow I got the sketchiest text message that asked for my email address so they could send me my paperwork.

Speaker 3 20:17

I actually most people that get put on call in PRC reporting have to call in PRC. They have to call in to a voicemail every month, once a month and I had this really lax PO that was my interim PO and he put me on call in every three months.

Speaker 1 20:36

I didn't even know it was a thing. I was on that one. It's not a thing.

Speaker 3 20:38

I was on that one. Yeah, I got every three months. I bet I was on regular PRC reporting in person for six months. And then I got this interim PO and he put me on the three month call in and it said like I don't get in trouble, I had a good job, I do what I am supposed to do, I just got married. And he's like you're at least my worries, Just give me a call in three months. And I'm like okay. And when I got my new PO that I've had for the last three and a half years or four years, she just kept me on that schedule. I saw her more for travel permits for work than I ever called in. I have one more call in and I've been avoiding travel for work.

Speaker 1 21:34

I forgot to actually even talk about that man. I'll tell you on the next episode or two I want to kind of talk about collateral sanctions that travel permits was a big hard one for me because my first job out was truck driving and being on this whole phone system reporting thing. My PO changed like five times and they never told me. And so I would have to come in to get a travel permit and they're like oh, I'm not your PO anymore, oh, you're on the phone system, call this person in Youngstown, call this person in Toledo. I'm like bro. And when I finally sat down with somebody they were just there to put a signature on a paper and they were like you can't do this. I was like listen, man, you're on my way.

Speaker 1 22:26

You're trying to set me up to go back because I basically have to ask permission to go to work now I had to cancel a couple of work trips.

Speaker 3 22:37

It's more convenient now because I got promoted, but before my boss was really understanding and he had helped me out and we had make other arrangements, like I would cover somebody's stuff in state so I didn't have to leave and they would go out of state.

Speaker 1 22:53

You know, because I got to the point where I just stopped going and they were like, well, if you get caught out of state, you know right. But I went to Florida and I took it to a police station because you got to take it to whatever local police station and you got to get assigned by somebody. I was like I don't care if the receptionist signs, I just need somebody to sign it. And they were like no, no, no, it's got to be the officer. I think you should go over to the registration place. I'm like registration for what? Like? Where all the like, arsonists and sex crimes, everybody has to register. I'm like, bro, I just need a fucking signature.

Speaker 3 23:31

Right, and I finally would just call them and I would purposefully arrive after business hours and I'd be at the hotel and I would call and they're like oh, we don't have anybody in the office right now, can we send an officer out to your hotel? And that worked for me for the last year and a half or so, but several times. I only had one time where they gave me issue and the one time was last spring, in March my birthday is in March and it had been four years since I got out and I was in the state of New York trying to get my travel permit signed, standing in the police station where it says must have a valid ID, and it was the day after my birthday and I pull out my.

Speaker 3 24:20

ID and my license was expired.

Speaker 3 24:22

So here I am out of state with no valid ID, driver's license, and like, oh man, am I going to have to call somebody to come pick me up or what? You know, I got a work van out in the parking lot and you know it was just like I panicked. Dude never even looked at the date on my license, though, so you know I was good. As soon as I got home I got my license. I had forgot all about it. It was something I didn't think about getting your license renewed.

Speaker 1 24:54

Yeah, man, it's so much you got to do when you first come home, and it's it's a lot at once, man. But we'll get to that. But let's double back, man. So me and Joe were good friends. Uh, we were locked up together, uh, for the last few years of our sentences. We both did 10 years. But let me see, you said you got out in March, I got out in May. How long do we know each other man? Probably what? Oh 17, 2016. No, I was longer than that Like cause.

Speaker 3 25:27

I went to the camp in 2015 and we were like magic acquaintances, like you went to the camp before I did, but we had played magic a couple of times, oh yeah.

Speaker 1 25:40

On the inside. On the inside, yeah, okay. So, um, if you guys remember, I had talked about just passing time playing Dungeons and Dragons and Magic the Gathering, also known as MTG. Uh, so me and Joe played both of those together and passed a whole lot of time and eventually just became good friends. The episode today that we're focusing on is holidays, because it's that time of year, but also cooking, because that is a big part of the holidays on the inside. Uh, I was very reluctant to cook with just anybody. Me and Joe cooked one time together and it was phenomenal and next thing you know, it was like man, why don't let nobody else cook with y'all? It's just the way it is. Sorry, you gotta meet certain requirements to get in this circle, man.

Speaker 3 26:30

It led in the more stuff too, and like with the money situation you said you were going to talk about that a little bit.

Hustles in Prison Cooking

Speaker 1 26:37

But yeah, yeah, yeah. So on the episode about hustles um, I have briefly mentioned that um sort of a kind of hustle is if somebody can't get money on their own books due to fines, court costs, uh, whatever reason child support then they'll find somebody who doesn't get money and usually use them to have their family put money on that person's account. Uh, I did get money, but me and Joe were really good friends, so I allowed him to use my account to put money on and, um, since we cooked together all the time, I really didn't see it as too much of a conflict.

Speaker 3 27:11

Yeah, like, hey, we were playing meals out for the week and then both kind of buy our share of that and he would just go pick it up. Yup, so that would work. It worked out for me because, like I had tried a couple of people and you know they always want more and more and more Like you would tell somebody hey, I'm sent a hundred bucks and you give them 10 bucks out of it, but this is a guy that only gets $15 a month. So you know, I always explain it as there's two types of people in prison when you buy some from somewhere, there's a 50 cents under guy and there's a 50 cents over guy. You know. So if, if I owed VA $10, he's a 50 cents under guy. So he's going to give me a list of stuff from commissary and it's going to be $9 and 47 cents, or you know. And then there's those guys that are like, oh well, it's just a couple bars of soap. It came out to, you know, 1072. Is that okay?

Speaker 3 28:22

And you're like, yeah, but you know, I had always dealt with 50 cents over guys, and then I come into this situation and we cook together and then it was like I don't care, I didn't care either.

Speaker 1 28:35

You know like we don't have to pay me anything, right? You know, I get my own money, which I was fortunate about, but real quick man. One of the things that you said was VA, so for people that don't know when I was in, prison everybody has a nickname in prison.

Speaker 1 28:50

Mine was Seamus, so this was Seamus and I was VA, because I'm from Virginia and, as you can imagine, there was a lot of New York's, detroit's and Miami's and whoever else that you know. It's basically where you're from most of the time. But that was just the interesting thing. I get kind of weirded out when people refer to me as VA out here people I keep in touch with from being in prison, because it kind of forces me to look back on where I was and then kind of see like where I am now you know how far I've come, but something as little as a name man, va.

Speaker 3 29:31

Yeah, I only said it because your hat said VA Earlier.

Speaker 1 29:36

When I first saw you I was like oh VA, you know one of that had on purpose man?

Speaker 3 29:41

Yeah, I was wondering. I wore my Seamus patty hat today.

Speaker 1 29:46

I know you can't see it, but I got my little patty hat on today, so so, yeah, cooking, there's so much that goes on in prison as kind of tied to cooking and you wouldn't really think about it. I mean, look, it's been what five minutes, and we've already talked about how many different subjects, right, but the biggest one is, like you referred to, the 50 cents under and the 50 cents over. The reason why I was very selective about who I cooked with was one because people rarely ever wanted to fully commit to their share. You know you're like, hey, this is a $20 meal for simple numbers and the guy's like, all right, man, I got $3 over here.

Speaker 3 30:35

Hold on. One of the most common phrases at meal time preparation is oh man, what do I need to get in on that? Like throw me in, bro. Like all this man, Like you need all this. Like there's three summer dogs sitting on here, there's a box of mac and cheese, there's, you know, two bags of rice and eight soups, and a guy would come up with two soups and a half of summer sausage that he had already cooked off of yesterday and be like can I get in with this? And it's like, ah, you know man.

Speaker 1 31:14

That happened a lot of times, man. So when I first got to prison, you know I had mentioned this earlier how I would only cook alone and I wasted half the shit. I would cook a $12 meal twice a day and fucking give half of it away. Because when we talk about cooking most of us done in the microwave and about, let's say, 100% of the time, almost you eat it out of a Tupperware Bowl, Right Like a seven quart Tupperware Bowl with a fucking giant spoon, and you know you eat off of it all day. So I would make this seven quart Tupperware Bowl and then give half of it away. And then about two years in I was like where the fuck is all my money at?

Speaker 3 32:04

Yeah, I was the opposite when I first come down, because I was all right at first and then I got put on the court fine, saying you know where I couldn't get money sent to my books without them taking it and you know I got $12 a month. So that was my hygiene, like hygiene's, you know you take two showers a day because you went to the gym, and sometimes three, and you know soap starts getting expensive and it's all you can do on state funds to keep up with that.

Speaker 1 32:41

And if you get issued state soap because that is a thing it will eat your fucking skin alive.

Speaker 3 32:46

Yeah, it's so much life.

Speaker 1 32:48

Well, I used to use my state soap to clean myself. That's how fucking industrially strong it was. I would use it to wash my clothes because it kept my whites white.

Speaker 3 33:01

Right.

Speaker 2 33:02

Yeah.

Speaker 3 33:02

So full of lie. It's like fight club soap.

Speaker 1 33:07

You know like lie and you know that was about it A little bit of fat in there somewhere Just enough to keep it in a bar. Yeah, so that kind of led it. We talked about, like your progression, you know so we talked about progression in our pre chat and mainly what we went by, that is, there's a difference, like there's levels I keep saying that it's levels to this shit. So when you first get to prison, most likely you have no clue what a break is your mind blown the first time you come in contact with one Cause. You're like that looks fucking disgusting.

Speaker 3 33:49

Unless you saw it at the county, which is even worse even worse, the county level break is like a slim gym and a Raymond soup that's cooked in moderately warm water, that you kind of set three books on top of. Yeah.

Speaker 1 34:05

And you like, you chew up the. This sounds horrible recounting. You got chew up the slim gym the, bite it into pieces, you know. And then you know you get some squeezed cheese or something. You mix it all up on a big trash bag that you cut open on the table and then you scoop it in the cups and hand it out to whoever was in on that break.

Speaker 1 34:27

So that's county level and that was horrible. But by the time you get to your parent institution, you know your introductory breaks are like okay, I got some ramen noodles, I put some chips in it. You know, you might start first time you get in contact with fried soups.

Speaker 3 34:46

Yeah yeah, the Raymond soup is totally prepared, different than it is outside.

Speaker 1 34:53

So, yeah, you get to your parent, you got some fried soups, you got some chips, some squeezed cheese, maybe summer dog, summer sausage, maybe a pack of tuna or Jack mackerel, and you just mix that in a bowl altogether down a hatch, but, but you also just came from reception, where you only could buy a little cereal bowl, oh yeah, you know, so you know you're like you wrote in and you can't go to commissary for, like you know, like maybe two weeks or a week or even a month, if you're on state pay, like you might you don't get state pay until you get to a parent institution and are issued a job.

Speaker 3 35:40

Yeah, so you might not be able to go buy an actual one of the seven court Tupperware bowls. You just have like a little yellow cereal bowl with a lid and the only thing you really do is chop up some summer dog summer sausage and a Raymond soup and heat it up. It's hard to, you know, work out of.

Speaker 1 36:03

But you know, once you progress let's say year one you hit your year one mark. You're making like with air quotes, complex bricks. You know there's layers involved. There's you probably. My mother was so disgusted by the fact there was pickle and everything Before you even get to all that you've got utensils to do this stuff. So you've got your bowls, you got your spoons, you have a cutting utensil. So in prison, of course, you're not allowed to have any knives, but somehow you got to cut up all this stuff, right?

Speaker 3 36:42

You start with your ID badge. Yeah, like it's got a sharp edge. It's firm. If you're really good about it, you can get it to go through a summer sausage skin and maybe dice up some onion if you're lucky to get a whole of one.

Speaker 1 37:01

I mean we would sharpen the edges against, like the bed rails or you know, concrete or something so we could cook with them.

Speaker 3 37:09

This sounds like fucking using a stone tool, yeah right, like a dark cage, like somebody making a shank, and you got to be like you. If you get lucky, you go. Go to an institution that used to sell tuna in a can.

Speaker 1 37:27

Yeah, tuna roast beef roast beef cans make the best cutters because the metal is so thick that we would open the cans and keep the lids and like fold it over for a handle, yeah, and then sharpen it along the metal edge of a bed or something and you know those were your cutters. You had to be careful because the average CO your regular eating care, you know.

Speaker 3 37:53

There was the new guy that was gone, there's always the new guy.

Speaker 1 37:55

It's like I found a knife.

Speaker 3 37:57

No man, this guy had a whole collection of knives over here. Right, he's got some. He's got two of them, one for each hand, and like.

Speaker 1 38:08

Hey, you know, I had a friend man, one of my old bunkies. I don't know where the fuck he got this plate from, because they don't sell plates on, commissary, it's only Tupperware bowls and sporks or spoons and somehow this dude had a plate, a knife and a fork and he would keep all of his food separate. He would eat like rice and fish and green beans or whatever. And people thought he was the weirdest dude ever, like that's how normal it is to eat breaks, or you know, what we'll get to later is these meals and the difference. But he did not for some reason want to eat breaks or these fancy complex meals. He ate the simple food on a plate with a fork and a spoon. Yeah, and people were like yo man, you have bunkies. Weird, like we have to eat with this.

Speaker 3 39:04

And he was like nah, I'm good.

Speaker 1 39:06

And I'm sitting here like he eats with a plate and a fork and you're saying he's, and all of his food is separate, right, and you're saying he's weird.

Speaker 3 39:14

Maybe he was that little kid that if his peas touched his mashed potatoes he could no longer eat it.

Speaker 1 39:21

I'm like, yeah, he's just not institutionalized. And then people get offended because they're like, oh, I ain't institutionalized Whatever.

Speaker 3 39:31

Anyway, so we're back to the progressions yeah, so you tend to lose progression, you know eventually you got lucky and you got a big mixing spoon or something that made everything, cause you know, a lot of times when you first start out you're doing this with a spork from the chow hall. You know that you've got away with sticking in your pocket and getting it back to your, your cell and guys would do like the sharpening the, the canned lids. They would take a spork and take it out on the side of the building on the brick and rub it until all the spork tongs were gone and it was just a spoon. You know like.

Speaker 1 40:19

Man reliving this is like damn man yeah.

Speaker 1 40:23

This is the struggle. So like this is how you knew you kind of had to vet who you could cook with, because if you came and you still had that little yellow bowl and you know the spork and stuff and that's all you got half a summer dog. I'm like you're not serious about this. Man Right, either you're not serious or you just not on my level. You should go find somebody else to cook with, because me and Joe Sheamus here, if you were like hey man, let's cook a meal, we would show up with a seasoning bag. You know it was like a makeshift net bag that had all the seasonings we use to cook and that alone showed you like, oh, this dude's serious.

Creative Cooking Techniques in Prison

Speaker 1 41:09

Yeah, like he's got garlic powder, he's got season salt, he's got Italian seasoning. You know some shit that you had to get on food.

Speaker 3 41:18

It's exotic food box seasoning.

Speaker 1 41:19

Yeah.

Speaker 3 41:22

I ordered food boxes and I would get a couple things, but it was mainly coffee Like, because I like Taster's Choice. So I ordered 10 bags of coffee and maxed out all my seasoning and then if I had enough weight left over in my box because you got a weight limit then I would throw in some of the, you know, larger exotic items, like the specialized tuna or different cheeses that you could get. Oh yeah, the smoked tether or flavored summer sausage. That wasn't just the original bridge port or whatever it was.

Speaker 1 42:00

Yeah, yeah, what was the honey turkey? Honey turkey.

Speaker 3 42:04

You know stuff. You couldn't get in commissary on a day-to-day basis every week. Yeah man, but it was coffee and seasonings, because that was how you could take your even a break to the next level. Like a break is basically the same seven or eight ingredients.

Speaker 1 42:25

Yep, figure out how to remix it, make some new man.

Speaker 3 42:29

You had a meat which was summer sausage, or fish, which was either tuna or Jack mackerel, and then it's like chicken maybe, but chicken was expensive. Roast beef was expensive, so that was like talking about holidays roast beef and stuff like that were like a holiday meal.

Speaker 1 42:48

Because a packet or can of roast beef was like eight to $10. I mean, if you got it out of the food box and it was like the big package, it could have been $15 per package, right, I mean and we are talking about, and it was heavy.

Speaker 3 43:01

The big package is heavy and you have to stay in your weight limit.

Speaker 1 43:04

Yeah, you were limited to like eight or five or something. But I mean, we talked about state pay. Fucking, you get a food box. It's $15 for a packet of roast beef. I'm like you just shot your load, buddy, right, yeah. And you know, if anybody's had ramen noodles, you either ate it as a soup, which was like really wet, a lot of liquid, or you might have drank a liquid out, put the seasoning in it, but in prison, like you, put it in dry and turn the microwave on for a couple minutes until it starts to brown. Yeah.

Speaker 3 43:38

With just a tiny bit of water so it doesn't burn.

Speaker 1 43:41

Yeah, I mean you got to keep a close watch on it because once it starts to brown it can go from zero to a hundred real quick. So you got to. There's an art to frying soups.

Speaker 3 43:50

I saw a YouTube video where or on Facebook or something, where a lady was frying ramen soups on her stove and she's like this is the way you make ramen soup, and she's making a break for her husband and I'm like one of these two were in the joint because no one ever cooks it that way, unless you know.

Speaker 1 44:14

If you were there, you know it's hard to adapt cooking in a microwave to cooking at home. Like I made so many recipes and stuff meals that I really liked and I brought them home and made them for my family and they were like man, this shit's amazing. But there is a severe learning curve. Trying to cook it on a stove top, like fry a soup on a stove top, like I had to get a walk to keep the shit moving. I've done it a couple of times and it's like, and then everyone's like what are you?

Speaker 3 44:45

burning. I'm like, oh nothing, it's making me a little snack for dinner time.

Speaker 1 44:52

Oh man. So yeah, basic break items chips, ramen noodles or rice, summer sausage or tuna, pickle squeeze cheese, barbecue sauce, mac and cheese, I don't know. That's pretty much all the ingredients there are. There are seasonings in it.

Speaker 3 45:17

Yeah, I used a half a chicken seasoning pack or, if you wanted spicy, used a half a chili seasoning pack. Yeah, if two people were cooking and you're cooking a meal for all day, to fill up your seven quart rubber made tub, you know you had probably four ramen soups apiece and you know, maybe a bag of rice and then your two summer sausage. You had a box of mac and cheese and then your condiments, right, right, and depending on how you put these together, you had a different meal, like if you put your rice and ramen on the bottom and then put your meat on and then put your mac and cheese on like a topper and then coated your condiments on there, then that tasted one way.

Speaker 3 46:09

But if you put the mac and cheese at the bottom and then the rice and then the meat all piled on the top and then some squeezed cheese on top of that, then that was a different meal than and technique is everything I mean, because and presentation.

Speaker 1 46:26

Technique and presentation, because I mean, if you just got like whole chips in here, whole nacho chips or whatever, yeah, like yeah, people do that.

Speaker 3 46:34

Oh yeah, that was another layer.

Speaker 1 46:36

Or we would crunch up a bag of chips in a bag and put a little water in it, gakes, pat it down into a cake and microwave it for like a minute or two and it would make like a kind of like a hash brown or something like for McDonald's. It'd be, you know, fluffy light. You sit that down. It's a zone layer, you know. You could just crunch them up fine into a powder and drizzle it. Whatever is so many ways to make the same ingredient something different. Yeah.

Speaker 3 47:09

But the chips, though, was an art yeah.

Speaker 2 47:13

Because if you did not do it right, it was this big rubbery rectangle.

Speaker 3 47:17

You had to cook it the right amount of time for the consistency to be something different than potato chips.

Speaker 1 47:24

Yeah, and like the summer sauces, like you can cut it into slices, you could cut it in. Basically it's like ground beef Cucumber. Yeah, you could cook it in barbecue sauce, hot sauce. I would put honey in mine, honey and barbecue sauce or hot sauce. We thought we were like at the epitome of culinary geniuses in here, you know. But eventually, like all cavemen, we evolved right and along came the meals.

Speaker 3 47:58

And meals were different. Two years, three years. We ate really well compared to that, yeah.

Speaker 1 48:05

So by that time you know mind you, this is in the grand scheme of things this is year eight in prison, so we've had a lot of time, a few different institutions to travel to.

Speaker 3 48:16

Different cooking partners where you learn different techniques from.

Speaker 1 48:21

And at this time I did not eat in the chow hall at all as supper breakfast. I only went there for the cereal and muffin, peanut butter and jelly sandwich. So the only thing I ate out of the chow hall was what I paid somebody to procure.

Speaker 3 48:37

I won't say stale, I'll say procure I used to get paid to bring stuff back, or I would get apples and stuff, and then I would go to breakfast and if somebody didn't drink their orange juice, they had those little four ounce cups with the foil tops. And you know, if the guys didn't drink them, like, hey man, can I get your orange juice? And then later on you could have a glass of orange juice that wasn't at breakfast in the chow hall. Yeah, so I get them in my pockets and I you know I got away with it the longest time, but every now and then you get this random pat down from a CEO.

Speaker 1 49:14

And then take your orange juices, and then they're like, yeah, go on, get out of here.

Speaker 3 49:18

Well, this one CEO, he let me go with them, for like he would pat me down and they'd be in my pockets.

Speaker 2 49:26

And this went on for like three days.

Speaker 1 49:28

All right, go ahead yeah.

Speaker 3 49:31

And then one day he's pat me down and I'm like cool, he let me keep my orange juices. Again, I'm walking back to the block from breakfast and suddenly like my hoodie's all wet and I'm on cancer wet and I'm like this asshole stuck his thumb through the tops of the foil on the order and then let me go and I'm like, oh man, he got me, you know, and I was there so long after a while. That was when he, you know, started. Let me just take the stuff. Like we knew each other. You know, it's like like we were going to be buddies, but I was in Grafton so long that, like this dude was my age and our Beards got gray at the same rate. You know, and you know just, we kind of grew a little older at the same time and they kind of just understand like this is your hustle.

Speaker 1 50:30

Yeah, Like sometimes you get a CEO who is also a veteran at doing time because I mean, shit, that's what they're doing there too, and they finally just understand like you're just trying to fucking survive.

Speaker 3 50:42

Right, like I've never gotten along with a bag of hooch. Yeah, yeah, I'm trying to get my orange juice back to make hooch and sell it or drink it and get drunk. No, I was. I just wanted a glass of orange juice, man. I mixed it with verners. Every now and then I treat myself to, you know, a few cans of pop. I'd have some verners, and when I was a kid I drank verners, and orange juice is like a virgin screwdriver, so it just. You know, I I like the taste of verners and orange juice, but the only place you can get orange juice is out of the chow hall or off a commissary for an eight ounce bottle for $4. Yeah, you know, it's super expensive.

Speaker 1 51:25

We talk about how we've progressed to this level of making meals. It's more than just the food right it's. You got to have your drink right, whether it's, and the drinks are kind of in a class of late breaks.

Speaker 3 51:39

Yeah, meals to begin with, like foxy is the big prison drink.

Speaker 1 51:43

That's like a break. I foxy is an equivalent of a liquid break, because it has the strongest of coffee you can never imagine brewing in it and the coffee is all powder. And then it has what Soda candy.

Speaker 3 52:01

Right, like layers of jolly ranchers.

Speaker 1 52:05

We were no jolly ranchers. Kool-aid so much Kool-aid that it's a wonder how it ever dissolved. You might have to put it in the microwave for three minutes. Four minutes, it's just to get it hot enough to dissolve the Kool-aid. Right and it's like this dark purple and then you put it over ice. Yeah, and the key to a good foxy is, once it's done, you hold it up to the light and if you can see any light through it, you've done it wrong, yeah.

Speaker 3 52:35

And if you spilled it on anything an article, clothing, a sheet, a chair, a table it looked like a Beaches, a picnic table underneath a mulberry tree, all that dark purple stain and it never came out. You needed a new shirt.

Speaker 1 52:54

So in the beginning, I could say in my first four years, I drank a foxy or two every day and little did I know that shit was killing me. It was eating my insides Kidney stones. But you know so, by the time I get to this era of me and Seamus cooking together, it's like dude, I just want a cup of orange juice, you know yeah.

Speaker 3 53:19

Like simple shit, little pop on ice. Yeah, you know, hated Kool-aid. I did not drink Kool-aid.

Speaker 1 53:28

I mean by this time they had done away with sugar in prison anyway. So Kool-aid was all the no sugar super.

Speaker 3 53:36

Diet yeah, sacrum stinks.

Speaker 1 53:40

We've progressed to this level of meals and, oh my God, I'm so thankful that I've gotten there at the end of it all, second half of the bed, because now we're like, let's make some roast beef and mashed potatoes. Yeah, you know, there's the simple meals like that, you know, and then there's, like you know, we did, lasagna, the lasagna.

Speaker 3 54:07

So I had a pen pal. It was a girl that was in Marysville.

Speaker 3 54:12

And she was like I mean lasagna, and I'm like, oh, how'd you make it? You know, you know a couple of letters back and forth and we used to kind of scam phone calls. She would call my friend at home and I would call him and he would three-way to call him and set his phone down so we could talk. And then we talked about the lasagna. So I tried it the way she told me to do it. It's like she used raiment soup but we had a bag of egg noodles which are basically the same as lasagna noodles they're just smaller, you know and I tried to cook the noodles and then layer the lasagna and with the cheese and the sauce and the meat and it just, it just tasted like a hamburger helper. Hamburger helper lasagna has a slight lasagna.

Speaker 3 55:08

Well, I figured out that lasagna noodles are cooked in the sauce. That's what cooks them. So I put my noodles in the bowl, each layer dry, and then I put the sauce on it and then layer another noodle and then the sauce and cheese, and then I would just kind of judge in how much water I needed.

Speaker 3 55:34

And then the noodles cooked in the sauce like lasagna, and it tasted just like lasagna. It was mozzarella cheese grated with Parmesan. I grated that mozzarella real fine and then made like and it did taste like ricotta cheese, but that took trial and error and it didn't taste right until I added the blue cheese dressing.

Speaker 1 56:00

That's dope man Talking about cheese grater is crazy how these little things keep popping up. We talked about utensils and we talked about having a cutter made of a soup can, a fish can or a roast beef can.

Speaker 3 56:17

But if you got a can of sardines, you know you peel the tabacco sardines we would have somebody put a couple cans down to maintenance and have them hammer and nail through it 500,000 pounds From the inside out, and then your outside has all the little ridges.

Speaker 1 56:36

And so we would use it as a cheese grater for, like, our blocks of mozzarella and stuff. So remember, I keep telling you, man, I met some of the most genius and ingenuity of people ever in prison. If there's something that we feel like we need, we're going to find a way to get it. It is going to be contraband, like a motherfucking but, and it's one of those things like if you get caught with it, don't say where you got it from, because you know Because you'll get another one unless you say who's right.

Speaker 3 57:13

There's never. I don't know where that came from. Dude went home and left it to me.

Speaker 1 57:17

Right.

Speaker 3 57:18

Like I don't know how they made that.

Speaker 1 57:21

And that was just an interesting little sidebar, but yeah, so, yeah, we, you know, we made lasagna. That was probably one of my favorites. I'm about you.

Speaker 3 57:31

Probably want. It was in my top five for sure, if not my favorite meal. It wasn't the most unique, but it was the only thing that tasted just like lasagna. Every time I made it I could hand someone a little bowl of it because it was huge. It was like it filled the seven court you know rubber mabe bowl. I couldn't eat it all and you know I had it enough that it was like old to me. You know like it was good, but it didn't have that oh my God, this is amazing yeah.

Speaker 3 58:03

And the next time I made it I would give someone a little bowl and let them taste it and that person would be like, oh man, what do I need to get a bowl of this? I'm like you need all this and I would just hand them all the ingredients and it was enough for me to have a bowl and that person to have a bowl and I would make it all. And they knew that was my cost of making them with lasagna.

Speaker 1 58:24

Dude, I remember 2017 Christmas, where everybody's so on Christmas for the meal in the child hall, they actually let you bring your top word bowl so you can take your meal back to the block and they serve, you know, the mashed potatoes and stuffing and you might get a piece of pie or whatever. And everybody thought like, oh wow, this is the best meal ever. And so me and Joe, like man, fuck all that, I'm not going. And so in 2017, we actually got all of our friends together to play magic and we made this lasagna and it was basically put at the whole bill to make this for everybody, because, you know, a lot of the guys we played with didn't really have a lot of money.

Speaker 3 59:14

Yeah, a couple guys kicked in, like you know. Everyone came in, there was like four of us that footed the, and then there were four guys that was like here, merry Christmas man.

Speaker 1 59:24

Yeah, yeah. So I made you my display game and buy a couple of sodas for everybody.

Speaker 3 59:28

Yeah.

Speaker 1 59:29

And for the most part it was me and Joe and I think Dave, dave was on it.

Cooking and Sharing Meals in Prison

Speaker 3 59:35

Yeah, the other magic Carl. Yeah, the other magic guy.

Speaker 1 59:41

Yeah, so we actually put this together and for all the people that played magic, I'm talking about like we. I mean, we had like what? Six people, eight people, something like that.

Speaker 3 59:53

There were. There were six people, and we ended up with so much that it was two extra bowls. Yeah. And I think we picked somebody that we were kind of both cool with and gave.

Speaker 1 1:00:03

I can't remember but I think we gave it was Zach.

Speaker 3 1:00:07

We gave him a bowl because he was like, standing at the table, like oh man, we're all chow down, and uh, yeah, zach was standing at the table and he didn't get invited to the magic game. So he was kind of butt hurt about it and uh, you know, and then we gave him a bowl, that it was Zach.

Speaker 1 1:00:25

Yeah, and so I've already talked about the value of a dollar in there. Like when we say like a dollar in prison, it's like $10 out here, If not more. Yeah, Because it's so hard to come by in there unless you know you get a steady supply of money from your family, but even then it's like really hard to have like real money in prison, just like a lot of money. And so for these six, seven, eight guys, we probably spent like a hundred bucks on this meal, you know yeah.

Speaker 3 1:00:59

Well, the bowls were $20 a piece. It costs well, the first bowl cost $20 and then it was like 15 to add an additional bowl, you know. So, like you could get, you can make the ingredients stretch a little more, but yeah, so even at six times 20, I mean it was $120, probably $150 worth of food.

Speaker 1 1:01:23

And I mean they have industrial kind of microwaves and stuff. But it was an hour. Let me tell you how bad people were because we started in the morning. So, like you know, it's holiday, so everybody that has money is trying to cook, but there's only like three microwaves and we had these microwaves on lock for like four or five hours.

Speaker 3 1:01:48

Each bowl, in order to make it come out right and taste like lasagna, had to be microwaved for 30 to 45 minutes. Man. And you know it was like a judgment thing, like once it hit a half hour like I didn't even touch it for a half hour and people come up like can I get a warm up for my coffee? And you're like yeah, over there, that was not opening for 25 more minutes, dude.

Speaker 1 1:02:10

You'd be at the microwave so long you'd kind of have like a security detail like yo just hang around for a minute and talk.

Speaker 3 1:02:18

Yeah, like I gotta go, I gotta run outside real quick, you know what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 1:02:22

There's like 10 nudes over here trying to warm up a cup of coffee and I'm like, nah, this one's, this one's locked down. Man, you gotta go somewhere else. And so, like it was, it was amazing, man, but you know, this is the holiday, like this is how we chose to come together, spend our holidays and pretty much keep from being fucking depressed and stuff. Right, just all right, we're gonna come together, play some magic, we're gonna eat a good meal, like fuck, with their serving that child, yeah.

Speaker 3 1:02:51

Yeah.

Speaker 1 1:02:53

Cause you had your phone call with your family in the morning Like hey, happy Thanksgiving or Merry.

Speaker 3 1:02:57

Christmas, and then they're not on your mind anymore and you're not on their mind, you know.

Speaker 1 1:03:05

And they're just trying to make that phone call as a whole. Nother headache in itself. Cause you know what they're in the block. It was like five, five phones.

Speaker 3 1:03:12

Well, the camp it was, it was yeah, there were, so no, and then they added for it there were nine phones on each side of the camp, In inside, and the but there's in the, in the block there's like 500 people.

Speaker 1 1:03:27

So, we're not well. You're like oh, nine phones is a lot.

Speaker 3 1:03:31

But we just came from. You know, at first it was great, you know, cause we came from inside where there were four phones per block and it was a two hour wait to make a phone call on the holidays, If not more. Yeah, Like you're, you wanted to make the holiday phone call. You got up at six and be like all right, who's last on the phone? You know, like I'm going to skip breakfast today and sit here for two hours reading a book while I'm waiting to make a phone call.

Speaker 1 1:03:59

So this is, this is funny, right Cause in the morning and when when I say morning, I'm talking about soonest count clears which is usually like what? 630, 630, 630 count clears and you're allowed to move. There will be people, no bullshit. It would look like they're on a starting line of a race and they got like either you're going to the phone or you're going to the microwave. I don't know how you know and it is.

Speaker 3 1:04:27

If you were good like me and you cooked together. One of us went to the microwave and the other one went to the phone and then, like the window was right there, it's like do, do, do, all right, you're next dude. He throws the food in the microwave for another 10 minutes on lock, keeping the microwave on lockdown for 10 minutes while he comes around, and then I go to the microwave after I hand him the phone.

Speaker 1 1:04:50

Right, me and Joe shared money accounts. It'd be like I'd make the call for him, hand him the phone and go to the microwave, yeah. So nobody saw like oh, joe came and made a call. Like no, that call was already going. Yeah. And also like if you were a porter or you knew a porter that you were cool with, you know they got to be out during count. So it was like hey, go put this in the microwave for me.

Speaker 3 1:05:20

I got. You know, that's how I got the microwave all the time I and I wasn't even a porter in our block. I got extra duty one time as a porter. I had to clean the block and I just stayed on as a porter for two years. I went to college. I didn't have to have an institutional job, but I stayed on as a block porter and mopped the day room floor every day just to get that microwave first, Cause that was our life is cooking.

Speaker 3 1:05:48

You know like not our life, but you know, that was our big thing, it's like I said at that point, we didn't go to child for anything.

Speaker 3 1:05:54

So, yeah, if you wanted to have a microwave and child hall wasn't an option, you sometimes had to get pretty aggressive or pretty creative and the porters when everyone else locked down before count there was a half hour where it was porter call and they would have to go out and do it. You would either clean windows, mop the floor, take out trash you know porter jobs were janitorial type stuff but the porters had a half hour to do their job or 20 minutes, and during that 20 minutes you were up while everyone else was stuck on their rack so you could get all your food and bowls out to the microwave and have the microwave saved for right after count. A lot of times I already had our food cooking like the lasagna. We would prep it all and then they would go into microwave. They would go into microwave for that half hour at count time.

Speaker 1 1:06:51

And the worst is when that big rush comes out. You already got my lasagna in the microwave, oh yeah. And then you always get the dudes just like what's that? Oh shit, now, now you're getting attention. People are like what I need? No, it's, it's a it's already done.

Speaker 3 1:07:09

Cook was already done.

Speaker 1 1:07:10

Done, done. We already got everything Like oh, man, you know, and it's like dudes will get so mad that you wouldn't give them a chance to get in on it, cause, like I said, once you get to level, like lasagna, this is common stuff. It's. It's basically you had to be like so far into your imagine imagination to come up with some shit that nobody else was eating lasagna. I mean a couple of more of my favorites. Was I made like some Asian spaghetti?

Speaker 3 1:07:43

That was one of my favorite things you made, that's for sure.

Speaker 1 1:07:46

So kind of like the same concept of frying a soup, I used to fry spaghetti you cook it till it's almost done, drain it, douse it in oil, put it in and keep tossing it. You know, in some seasons and so to this day I don't make spaghetti with any type of red sauce. I made this spaghetti with trail mix, so it had like nuts, cashews, peanuts, whatever, and dry fruit. So I kind of fried that in there, you know, sauteed it, whatever, and got some poison sauce which is kind of like an Asian, yeah, and so like this spaghetti was phenomenal. I mean we made like Philly cheesesteak wraps. What else?

Speaker 3 1:08:34

We made the big spaghetti I was going to save that one for last cause. That one was the. It was a fluke. Well, let's go over the other stuff first, because, like bean soup, this was cheap, it was so good. It was like your mom's bean soup, like five bean soup, I think.

Speaker 3 1:08:51

We had black beans, pinto beans, pinto beans, black eyed peas, and then there was one other bean in there it was like a chili, I don't know what it was, but there were four cans of beans. They were all like 88 cents a piece and so for under $5, and then we bought different kind of meat, like either chopped summer sausage that was like the initial but they had this jerked Caribbean pork, caribbean jerk pork bag. It was like a pound of pork, it was. It was expensive but it was one of the cheaper upscale meats. And that one was like the vegetables was a, the veggie flakes, dehydrated veggie flakes, and you soaked them in water and I can't even find those anywhere now, right In the Kroger or whatever I can't find those, the spice kitchen or whatever spice classic or whatever it was.

Speaker 1 1:09:52

But so people every day. People weren't eating this stuff. Nobody else was eating lasagna and exotic spaghetti. I had a seafood spaghetti. I made it Fish meat balls uh, philly raps, and they were starting to get kind of mad, like why the fuck you won't let us in on this Right Cause this is us.

Cooking in Prison With Exotic Ingredients

Speaker 3 1:10:11

Like, yeah, we would let people in, but they were. It was like a, a small group of people like we. Like the seasoning bag we talked about earlier, like there was a I can't remember his first name, but we didn't cook with him often because he was Muslim and he didn't eat pork and we ate pork a lot.

Speaker 1 1:10:34

So not only did he not eat it, but a lot of the Muslim guys in there. Well, they were like hey, man, I can't eat off of anything that had pork prepared on my thing. They take it real extra. Yeah, they shit all the time. Yeah, you know, and then so, but he had the seasoning bag.

Speaker 3 1:10:50

Oh yeah, so he was serious about it.

Speaker 1 1:10:54

His cooking.

Speaker 3 1:10:57

There were guys that we let in and the magic guys we would cook with because we were a group. My neighbor Danny, like he was a good cook. Like you see somebody making something and you see them make something a little exotic and and then you're like okay, this is the guy I can, I can probably get down with. You know, I can probably let him cook a meal for me and you you see him cook.

Speaker 3 1:11:23

Cause everyone's. It's the same people, day in, day out, that are cooking all the time. And you see a guy standing over the microwave and he's sweating and he's got this big bowl and his sweats dripping in there Like that dude's never cooking anything for me, ever, ever. Like I'm not even with you, like I don't even want you sitting at the table with me. Yeah, you know.

Speaker 1 1:11:45

I mean, but there were some dudes, man, I had like exceptional techniques, and I mean you kind of just stay close and watch a little bit. Sometimes, though, the way that people found a way into cooking with me was like anything else in life Like, do you have something? I need Something, I want? Yeah. Like when, when they came up with that garden program and the guys got me banana, peppers and tomatoes and the spaghetti squash that we came out with it was a fluke, but it was a fluke. But when you come to me and you're like hey, man, I got some vegetables. Man, like what you got, bro, I got this, this man, the spaghetti squash. Like where?

Speaker 3 1:12:28

What's the spaghetti squash? Like I never had that before.

Speaker 1 1:12:31

Yeah, I don't know what the fuck I'm going to do with it, right, but I know I need that because it's exotic and I'm going to figure something out and it was the end of the season. Hey, listen, man, my money's actually kind of in transit right now, but I got an idea of what I can do with this. Like I'll pay you with food At this point. We're damn near famous for food, oh hell yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 1:12:50

Like I don't know what I'm going to make, but when I make it you got a full size portion coming Like hell yeah.

Speaker 3 1:12:56

So, dude, I'm not going to put his name out there either, because he was in a program and you know he's still there, right. So, but he was my hookup for peppers and onions and tomatoes, like, if you got a tomato like I got, I paid him every week for two deliveries a week. I gave him, you know, a pretty good payout for those two delivery bags a week and each delivery bag was like two onions, two peppers, two tomatoes and basics.

Speaker 1 1:13:34

It was enough for Once you get to this level of cooking in prison, that's the basics, yeah.

Speaker 3 1:13:39

And then I usually like the weekend. If he can sneak me something, I throw him a little extra. Because the weekend was hard, because they weren't out there picking during the week, because the food goes to a program and they had the. You know it was under a watchful eye, Like there was, you know tried hard not to put this program under any scrutiny. Yeah, it's not there anymore.

Speaker 1 1:14:04

Oh, it's not, it's not, no, so I mean, it was still, just for the sake of you know, keeping it all cool. Yeah, yeah, it was cool. But I got the peppers, onions and, you know tomatoes on a regular basis and then every now and then he had like a jalapeno, like where he snuck a pepper plant and he weren't supposed to have, like you would get you know.

Speaker 3 1:14:27

And then like even green beans, like they had green beans, stuff like that you could get every now and then yeah, but then Wait, wait on jalapenos.

Speaker 1 1:14:36

So they used to sell jalapeno wheels and little bottle and then some asshole the side. It was a security risk.

Speaker 3 1:14:45

Yeah.

Speaker 1 1:14:45

So they couldn't sell any type of peppers anymore.

Speaker 1 1:14:48

And they couldn't grow anything more than a bell pepper you might make like pepper spray, and I was like man, if this isn't the biggest bunch of shit, right. So once again it became a thing that was like exotic, like you had to figure out who you could pay to get it, whether they worked in the child hall, whether in the garden program. You know, I also had a guy that paid every week just for ranch dressing, honey, you know, cheese, whatever it was that he figured was worth something in the child hall. Like man, you bring this twice a week. Yeah, I'll give you 10 bucks a week, yeah.

Speaker 3 1:15:27

Yeah, yeah. And or even some guys were like thirsty, like some do you bag of coffee, yeah $2 and 75 cent bag of coffee and they were your hookup.

Speaker 3 1:15:40

You know what happened with the spaghetti squash is dude had went to a visit and they did the pick in that day while he was at a visit. He's like, man, I don't have delivery for you. Like, how can I make it up to you? And I'm like, no, man, don't worry about it. He's like you know what? I got these spaghetti squash and that's where I was like what?

Speaker 1 1:16:04

That was a great size, right?

Speaker 3 1:16:05

Yeah, they were and they were hard to cut with a can Because the rind man we took longer to cut those two things and I got two of them. Do gave me two of them and then he still promised me my delivery and he came through.

Speaker 1 1:16:23

but he gave me the spaghetti squash is a good looking, you know and as a person who's made this at home, like cutting a large spaghetti squash in half down the length, wise and the rhino, with a butcher knife, it's. It takes some good force and technique and so we're in here trying to cut these things in half with a fucking can lid.

Speaker 3 1:16:51

Yeah, there's like rocks, like you could have probably used it as a weapon you know, and the spaghetti squash yeah. Yeah, Not the knife, yeah, Not the can lid. But we get them all courted out and we season them up and put like I'm like man, I want to make stuff squash with this. And so me and him planned it all out Like what do we want in it? Like I don't go live.

Speaker 3 1:17:16

This was mostly your idea, yeah, but it was like we had a box of stuffing and we put stuffing in the hollowed out portion of the squash stove top stove stop stuff. Stoffers.

Speaker 1 1:17:28

That's what it is Stoffers, stoffers, and then chicken Bacon, the salsa mix, because I still had the sazone.

Speaker 3 1:17:38

No, we put sazone uh, goya sazone on the the squash itself, Like if you have a website, I could write down a recipe for it.

Speaker 1 1:17:49

Yeah, you got it. Yeah, show us or something.

Speaker 3 1:17:52

Yeah, so spaghetti squash is seasoned at with the goya sazone. Put the stuffing in it. Then we had chicken Garden salsa that we had made from the last veggie delivery. You know, we just made garden salsa, tomato, onion and pepper. It went in that. It was a topping that went almost everything we cooked, and so we sprinkled that on and then put bacon wrapped around it.

Speaker 1 1:18:21

And then coated it with mozzarella cheese.

Speaker 3 1:18:24

Mozzarella cheese and then seasoned that too, and I couldn't figure out how to cook it. I'm like how are we going to bake this?

Speaker 1 1:18:32

And we put Couldn't find a container big enough to hold it.

Speaker 3 1:18:35

Yeah, so we put them in the microwave, on the lids, I think, with a bowl of water, and then steam the squash and we cook these for like almost an hour. The first time it didn't it wouldn't, it didn't take an hour. The first two were huge, when, once they were smaller, it didn't take as long. But it was a treat, it was like and it wasn't even a holiday meal.

Speaker 1 1:19:03

It was just like a fluke meal. We stumbled on it and we were like fuck it, what are we going to do with it?

Speaker 3 1:19:08

And dude couldn't figure out how like nobody could do anything with these spaghetti squash and he had them and he's like, well, they last for months, you know, like months, like if you put them in your locker box, these things last all winter. So I bought everyone I could get going into winter and I had those spaghetti squash in my locker box all winter long and the last time we had it was in March, right before I went home, and that was the last of the squash from the previous fall growing season.

Speaker 1 1:19:41

That was probably hands down like the best meal. I mean I liked the lasagna man. That was great.

Speaker 3 1:19:48

But I'm not going to make lasagna at home, right Like that. I'm going to make lasagna, lasagna.

Speaker 1 1:19:53

Probably two months ago, I legit made this for my wife and she was like oh my gosh, this is great and I'm like great, it was a prison meal, but the reason why I liked it so much is because it was relatively few ingredients.

Speaker 3 1:20:08

You know you got some stuffing.

Speaker 1 1:20:10

You got chicken, bacon, you know, and spaghetti squash for the most part Cheese and so and it didn't need this to be made in prison, in prison Stuff. Yeah, it wasn't like you had to mix it and layer it and all this stuff. Man and I'm somehow even in the microwave when we took this thing out. The mozzarella had made this great brown crust. It was it was legit a great meal for anywhere that you might eat it, whether it was in prison, whether it was out here.

Speaker 3 1:20:39

And it was its own container, like, because the rind of the squash was the bowl. You just had to be able to hold it and get your fork in there and it was nice and soft and easy to eat and but once again, though you make something so good, you basically always heat on you because everybody's a hater, everybody.

Speaker 1 1:21:00

For the first part, everybody wants in. But it's like all right, go give me a spaghetti squash.

Speaker 3 1:21:05

Yeah.

Speaker 1 1:21:05

Where the fuck are you going to get one? All right, get the fuck out of my face, man, leave me alone, right? But now you got people looking at you while you eat it, because it's fucking huge and it's you know, it's winter, holiday season, whatever and you got people trying to watch football games. So everybody's gathering around with whatever meal they made and they're like the fuck, is that? Yeah?

Speaker 3 1:21:31

They're, they're. They're still on break level cooking. Like you know, way back when they got a layered break of some, you know, rice or noodles and some fish and and you're sitting over here with something that like, if you took to our restaurant and saw it on the restaurant menu and they had a picture of stuff spaghetti squash you'd be like I've never had that. That looks so good Chicken stuffed spaghetti squash. I'm going to try that.

Speaker 1 1:22:04

Yeah, you know for sure I mean. So, okay, let me bring this back in, because we kind of got excited about this yeah, get it.

Speaker 3 1:22:10

So I want to make it now.

Speaker 1 1:22:11

I probably want to make it now, yeah, so we kind of got into meals and meals were pretty exotic for where we were. Man, it's not the run of the meals stuff that everybody else is eating, and for that reason I mean people. I had people offering to pay me, like, please, I'll pay you 20 bucks, I'll pay you 30 bucks just to cook it for me, and I'll buy all this stuff and I'm like, but you can't get the stuff, right, you know right and there would be one less spaghetti squash than I have.

Speaker 1 1:22:43

Right and I had the hookup Like so we had the only connect for these, you know we're pretty infamous in here for this, because I mean, you see me going to the microwave and you know one Joe's close by and is in on this, and you know two that you can't get in most likely, but three, you're like I'm curious what it is this time, right?

Speaker 3 1:23:08

And it always smells good, Like CEOs would come in and be like what are you cooking? It smells so good in here, because normally it's like the same seven ingredients, that there's three microwaves and there's three people waiting in line doing their prep work on a table beside it and they're going to cook the same thing that those three guys are all cooking. And then we throw something in with our big giant seasoning bag and different seasonings and you know, you got CEOs that are.

Cheesecake and Fudge Making in Prison

Speaker 1 1:23:37

They know it's contraband, but they're so fucking intrigued that they're like I'm going to stop by again a little later and see what this turns into. But so it wasn't just this type of food, you know, main meal food, Like we made a lot of desserts in there. Yeah yeah, Um, not particularly me, but Joe is pretty known for making his cheesecakes.

Speaker 3 1:24:02

I yeah, and that was another thing, so I just had an idea. Like man, they have this.

Speaker 1 1:24:14

They got cream cheese on the commissary, yeah. For bagels, everybody buys it for bagels. They got graham crackers.

Speaker 3 1:24:20

They got graham crackers.

Speaker 1 1:24:21

There's a little bit of cinnamon and you get somebody to get some butter out of the chalon.

Speaker 3 1:24:27

Yeah, and I was like I can make a cheesecake.

Speaker 1 1:24:31

I mean it's going to be expensive because these little cream cheesecakes are the little single serving little one and a half ounce cups for 97 cents and I'm going to need like 15 of them, you know.

Speaker 3 1:24:41

So I started like plant it and I'm like this is too expensive. I'm gonna have to share this with somebody. And the first time I made it it was with four people. We each got a quarter of the cheese cake, but it made a full-size cheesecake, like you know, and like I started mixing it all up and what I did is I sampled one cup first, like small portion, mixed it with, you know, some sugar. That was also contraband, so I had to work to make this cheesecake, so it very rarely got made.

Speaker 1 1:25:18

You can't have all the ingredients sitting on the table.

Speaker 3 1:25:21

Yeah, so.

Speaker 1 1:25:22

Some wandering eye might see that oh, that's all contraband right there. And sugar was a really big deal. Sugar would get your ass locked up. It was like having a pound of cocaine on the table.

Speaker 3 1:25:33

Yeah, yeah you know, like you got less trouble for having tobacco than you did sugar. But I mixed one of the little cups with a and I couldn't figure out how to get the consistency right to make a cheesecake and I crushed up some graham cracker and mixed it all up and the graham cracker real fine it would. When you microwaved it it would fluff up into like a semi-cake consistency, but the cheesecake made it. That's how it turned out and so I made this tiny little single like bite-sized cheesecake and ate it on a graham cracker Like, and I'm like it tastes like cheesecake.

Speaker 1 1:26:19

And then it went and evolved from there and turned into something great.

Speaker 3 1:26:23

Like we would have for holidays like we spent all day cooking lasagna and then like I had the cheesecake made the day before and it was sitting in a tub. Like I had a giant bowl that I would fill with ice and then the smaller bowl would sit in. It was my cooler.

Speaker 1 1:26:44

Yeah, yeah or more. If you had a trash can, you could fill it with ice, you know, or even a garbage bag.

Speaker 3 1:26:50

You know like, but the cheesecake was made the day before and for Christmas we had like two cheesecakes, all the lasagna, everybody had cheesecake and lasagna and all these jealous dudes. We were out in the middle of the day room with 200 guys walking by, coming back from the chow hall with their bowl and turkey. And you know, the last time that I went to the chow hall for the Thanksgiving meal, they didn't take the turkey.

Speaker 3 1:27:24

It was a turkey stuffing, like casserole basically, and some they came in white paper bags and they didn't take it out of the bags, like somebody mixed the bags all up and I don't know if you remember that. No, but I stopped going to those meals too, so yeah, they ruined the Thanksgiving meal the last time I went there it wasn't even real turkey, it was like turkey spongy like and I was like see, this is why I don't come.

Speaker 1 1:27:51

I really just came for the slice of pie. Yeah, but the slice of pie wasn't even worth the effort.

Speaker 3 1:27:56

So I was like I'm like, hey, hey, you gotta eat your cake. Hey, man, you gotta eat your cake. I hate to go to the chow hall because somebody's always asking you if you're gonna eat your cake. And I'm like the one time a dude always asked me he would sit by and be like you gotta eat your cake. I'm like, man, you can have half of it. He's like, all right, thanks. And I picked my cake up and took my fork that I hadn't eaten off of yet and cut the bottom half of my cake off. So you get all icing.

Speaker 3 1:28:21

And I had all the icing on my bear. You can have that half. He's like man, that's fucked up and I'm like stop asking me for my stuff. I stopped going to chow hall too, like I didn't even go to breakfast because I didn't get out of bed, you know.

Speaker 1 1:28:39

I'm like yeah Well, so you had the cheesecake. I actually did a lot of fudge and for a while I would sell the fudge. So you know, go to commissary, get some cookies. You know the sandwich cookies with the cream in the middle and it was like a laborious job to scrape all the cream out of the between the cookies and stuff. And you know, you can make like the classic peanut butter fudge, you can make chocolate fudge, or you can make the fudge with, like the cookies, or you can make cookie bars.

Speaker 3 1:29:14

Well, that got hard too, though, because once they got rid of the sugar because it used to be easy you just get a bag full of sugar and used actual sugar and made real fudge yeah, so I think they did away with sugar in like what? 2010, 20, something like that it was yeah, mid-20s, Like yeah, it was like 2010. It was after I was a graft in a year or so.

Speaker 1 1:29:40

It was after tobacco went away.

Speaker 3 1:29:42

Yeah, tobacco was the big push for getting rid of all that. First, like I was, it was like nine months after we got locked up.

Speaker 1 1:29:51

Yeah. So I mean you used to be able to buy like a box of sugar cubes or a bag of sugar and then it became like a no-no. But back then it was nothing to just go ahead and make a whole big ass slab of fudge. But once again we're not in like some confectionary culinary place that's built for this, like we're making this shit I'm talking about like putting 200 sugar cubes in a Tupperware bowl with two tablespoons of water and microwaving it until the sugar turns into liquid, and then, and then, and then Mix it into peanut butter.

Speaker 3 1:30:29

Then heating your peanut butter up, and to just the point that the jar didn't melt. Yeah, yeah. So, and if you got it on you it was, it was third degree burn.

Speaker 1 1:30:42

Yeah, but you make this, then you, you make like a cardboard mold lined with a A chess box. Yeah, A checker box chess box Lined with a trash bag and you pour the mixture in there, spread it out and then you can let it cool, naturally, or you can put it on ice, whatever, but for the most part, it started hardening as soon as you mixed it up because of the sugar.

Speaker 1 1:31:08

But you cut it up with that soup can lid and sell it for a dollar a bar man and that's how you pretty much hustle to get some money and you just walk around the box with your box. Oh, that's your soul to sell. Yeah, top it with the M&Ms or whatever.

Challenges of Limited Resources in Prison

Speaker 3 1:31:27

One of the other ones. This was when I was still poor, or you know like, I was still on state baby funds. You know, my $12 a week I had to, or a month I had to stretch out. So I started getting apples and I'd bring them back. I'd peel all the apples and I used tortilla shells but I would coat them. I had butter. I'd melt the butter, dip them in on both sides and then put cinnamon and sugar and it was like a flour. You know I don't want to call it in Mexico. You know it's like a I don't know. Yeah, not cinnabar, like cinnamon twist or whatever, but it was flour, tortilla shell. And then I would cook the apples with some sugar, apple cinnamon and butter and then I would stuff the shells and wrap them up like a little apple pie and I would sell those for a dollar a piece.

Speaker 3 1:32:24

But, it was a lot of investment.

Speaker 1 1:32:26

Your hustle was whenever you were limited to. Why your imagination man?

Speaker 3 1:32:31

And I had I peeled apples with a plastic knife. I had a plastic knife so sharp that I could peel apples with it and I stopped making them when I broke my knife, like I was like I can't peel potato or apples with a fricking can lid.

Speaker 1 1:32:51

Yeah, I mean a lot of the tools we came up with was stuff that you couldn't come up with just every day. It's not like, oh, this one lost or got broken or whatever, I'm gonna just go buy another one. It was pretty much like you had an opportunity of some kind to make it or your monkey went home. That goes back to the progression.

Speaker 3 1:33:14

Like when you first start out doing your bid, you don't have anything. And then you cool somebody and they go home and they had stuff, cause they were down four years before you were and they were already at stage two or three of your cooking progression and they were like, hey, man, I know we've been eating together and this is yours. And they come and hand you a stack of bowls with a big spoon and lids, or the plate.

Speaker 1 1:33:48

That was. Or that foot soaking tub that we used to cook on the big batches of rice in. Yeah, I remember if I was in CEO walking by and he saw me with like the fuck is that? I had one, because they took my foot soaking tub. I had one that was a flower pot, like a plastic flower pot.

Speaker 3 1:34:10

And you wonder what kind of chemical that you were coming off of this plastic into the microwave, from the microwave into your food. And then they would have fundraisers where you could buy different kind of bowls and stuff like that. Like, you obviously weren't allowed anything glass, so everything's plastic. And if you were good, part of the learning curve was when you're frying rice or soup or rice, you burn up a bowl. You know you melt the bottom out of your bowl.

Speaker 1 1:34:42

Bowls had a life. I definitely had a lifespan. Yeah, it wasn't forever, and I went through a lot of them and it was hard. So one more reason why you couldn't just eat with anybody is because if me and you cook and we have a necessity that requires one of my bowls and this is a very special bowl you can't just get in there. Well, you cook in with the wrong person and you're like, oh yeah, here, just use my bowl. You get your bowl back and it's all burnt up. It's a hole in the bottom of it. Right Now I'm ready to fight like fuck you. Right, yeah.

Speaker 3 1:35:18

Wait, you gonna beat me up over a bowl. Now I'm gonna beat you up because you're dumb. Like you know like not you know. I mean that's kind of a bad way to say it, but you know Anyway.

Speaker 1 1:35:29

All right, so I don't know. We've been going for a while, man, we've been recording for about an hour, oh well, so I don't know. We kind of wanded it down a little bit.

Speaker 3 1:35:38

But so, yeah, it's holidays, so it really comes down to. I know you started this about educating people's family about what they go through in there. And it's the holidays, you know it's the hardest time of the year, it is.

Speaker 1 1:35:56

Whether you celebrated or not, because it's a time where everybody, whether they have family or not, is kind of stressed, like if you're getting a visit, you're stressed because you wanna make sure they show up, you wanna make sure you get out there on time, all types of shit, or it's Fuck around. I have that very conveniently placed institutional lockdown right when you're about to get your visit or your smile.

Speaker 3 1:36:19

One of the most stressful holidays I had and it was someone being nice, kindness to their heart my stepmom. She passed away, you know, shortly after I got home, so I still love her to death. But food boxes and sundry boxes reset in December so that everyone gets new Allotments yeah, allotments, you can only get what?

Speaker 1 1:36:44

two food boxes a year, two food, depending on your level, security level you can get more.

Speaker 3 1:36:50

Like in minimum security you get two and two or any combination of four, like I think you could get up to three food boxes. You could get four boxes. One of them had to be a sundry box, which is clothing or stuff. Well, my stepmom wanted to be nice, sends me a clothes box and a food box for Christmas, used up two of them and at the time we only got three because I was medium security and she sent me like I mean, it was stuff that I could have got off, commissary, and it was like maybe 10 or 15 bucks, and she got me some socks and underwear and used up two separate boxes for maybe $30 worth of stuff. Now, most of the time I ordered a food box and it's 150. You gotta max it out $180,. You know, like I think the most expensive one I had was like $202. My sister was like, are you out of your mind this?

Speaker 1 1:37:52

is the first time that I ordered all the-. Sometimes you gotta wait till tax season.

Speaker 3 1:37:55

Yeah Well, it was my money, my sister had all my money you know, but it was when I first started ordering all the seasonings and stuff. So my seasoning bag, once I got it built, I didn't have to replace everything, buy everything every time, but the first one. I ordered those 10 bags and Taster's Choice, which were $11 or $12 apiece, and then all that seasoning, which is $5, $6 a jar or something you know.

Speaker 1 1:38:27

But yeah, that was- and because you can only do this twice a year. The main thing that you worry about when you're ordering stuff is weight and allotment, because on a lot of things you can only get so many of them, like you can't order a whole box with nothing but coffee, like there's probably you can only get 10 bags of coffee.

Speaker 1 1:38:48

Yeah, a 10 bag limit. You know if it was summer sausage, you just probably you know five, eight, something like that. I know the roast beef. There was only a 10 bag, 10 unit limit, because if I could and if I had the money, I would order another roast beef. Right, I mean it's expensive as hell, but on the holidays, man, it was clutch. So the main thing you worry about when you're ordering these is the weight. Like oh shit, man, I went over by 23 ounces. Like I need to get rid of something.

Speaker 3 1:39:21

you know Right and you're like what's the okay, I'm getting rid of this special summer sausage. Cause I can get summer sausage.

Speaker 1 1:39:31

And from the inside, from your point of view, like I'm ordering a box that's within like a three ounce window, Like either I'm right on the money or I'm three ounces shy. But you know your family, they're just trying to do something nice. They're like oh yeah, I got you some stuff Like whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa whoa. I didn't vet that list Right.

Surviving in Prison, Supporting Each Other

Speaker 3 1:39:51

Yeah, well, that's what happened and it was like $30 worth of stuff and it burned up two boxes, right, like right as they reset and I'm like, oh, thank you, mom, I really appreciate the Christmas present. You know, I'm not like going to be mad or you know, you did something nice, you know. But like that was like mid bid, when I had just started to get stuff from home and figure out how to manipulate the system and get my money sent in. And you know, those food boxes were important to me because I would have somebody that had money at home for me and that's how I would transition it from outside to inside was the food boxes and clothes boxes, you know. And then.

Speaker 1 1:40:37

But but so a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about, though, is basically you. I mean, we were fortunate. We were fortunate enough to have stuff. Yeah, I mean, we had money, we had resources, we had figured out how to make it happen. We were fortunate enough to have stuff, you know, have money, have resources, or whatever to get this and make it happen, but there were so many people in there that relied solely on state pay, kind of the derogatory terms, like state babies, yeah.

Speaker 3 1:41:18

You still see them with the state shoes, the head and front and front. Oh man, I said state shoes.

Speaker 1 1:41:22

I call them like combat boots. Those are the shoes of the struggle, you know, but it just like we made the most out of a bad time because you couldn't always rely on your family at home. Yeah, and some people didn't have family at home, oh, so we kind of became each other's little benefit families. You know, we played magic together, we played D&D together, we played together and we relied on each other to be a pleasant distraction from all the fucking stress, it was a prison family.

Speaker 3 1:41:57

Yeah, I mean, you know. And we kept in contact with each other Right one of the few people. I have less than a handful of people that I still talk to from that, you know, occasional like social media, like shout out, like hey, dude, glad to see you're doing all right, you know. But like you're one of the few that I talk to on the phone and text and have my personal phone number, yeah.

Speaker 1 1:42:24

So I just kind of wanted to bring that back to like a baseline is like there was a lot of people in there suffering around this season, and that's what I kind of want to bring attention to is like we came up with all this stuff that we did out of necessity to not be fucking miserable in prison, right, you know, and I was very thankful for the COs and the staff that understood that, because there are a lot in there who are very by the book, like oh, you can't have that, that's contraband. Oh, you can't do this, that's contraband, you know. And it's like dude, I got enough shit going on right now.

Speaker 3 1:43:03

Don't fuck this up Like it's not, like I'm gonna hurt somebody with my spaghetti squash.

Speaker 1 1:43:08

You know I'm gonna eat this and I'm gonna have a good meal and I mean, and it was even better if you were first enough to get a visit A lot of times a lot of people didn't. There were times I did, there were times I didn't. And me personally, man, I grew to basically not expect it, like if it came great, it was a great surprise or whatever, but for the most part I was like I ain't gonna visit, fuck that. What are we about to do, bro? What are we cooking, right?

Speaker 3 1:43:37

you know we're gonna cook this when you go to the store, buy this, this and this, and we're gonna sit down and play Magic that day.

Speaker 1 1:43:45

Yeah, and after this development of this relationship year after year, I mean hell, there was a year where I didn't have money and it was like, oh fuck it, I got you, you know Like we're gonna do it anyway, and whenever your money get right, you get another meal or whatever, and that shit's great man. But once again, everybody didn't have that. It was dudes that every once in a while, man and I was an asshole, I ain't gonna lie.

Speaker 1 1:44:13

When I was in prison in the beginning, whole different person. I was like fuck you, get away from me, stop fucking at me. By the time the end came, I had gone through so much fucking struggle that I'd be done cooked an extra bowl of some shit just to give it away to people Like yo, you ain't got nothing in here. They don't even know me, looking at me like what's the trick? Because in prison you don't just accept shit from people. Like that's not how it goes. I thought it was funny.

Speaker 3 1:44:42

There's dude. I won't say his name, but he was the one that made the Hispanic empanadas or whatever. Yeah, yeah, I know, I think like he always talked about how good he is and I see him on Facebook and he's making like those. Like he's talking about, I made this stuff. It was so good, I was a great cook and it's like he was on a level where he could eat for free because he could make it enough.

Speaker 3 1:45:11

But he made prison break stuff. He used cooking as his hustle but he made prison break stuff for people and then he got a bowl out of it and then like there was the level of like the guy I said before, who he had peculiar eating, you know restrictions, and he was on a slightly above level. And then there was me and Jeremy who were on a whole nother level of culinary experience in a microwave. You know what I know you said we're going long on time. But once you figure out the tricks and the techniques and stuff, then you start like it's not just saying I'm going to cook this today, like we had to plan for like two weeks at a time Our meal, like we're going to do this, and then he would come up with an idea and it was okay, that's going to be a good holiday meal.

Speaker 1 1:46:07

I mean really so I'd say about September. You know, once September began and September starts rolling around, we're already sitting down putting our hands together, like, hey, man, listen, I'm going to get some money at this time, and it might be about this much, or I got this amount that I'm going to set aside, like what meals are we going to do for Thanksgiving? What meals are we going to do for Christmas, new years, like whatever.

Speaker 3 1:46:32

Yeah, my day to day meals all come from magic cards. So there was times that I was light and he took care of me I mean, like you were my brother at that point, you know that was and he bought all the material. This is how I got into magic.

Speaker 1 1:46:47

I saw the potential for the hustle. Yeah, there's lots of money over the years. All right guys we're going to go ahead and wrap this up. Man, I actually got to go get my kids. Yeah, I got to get home. I got to drive back to the Cleveland.

Speaker 3 1:47:04

All right, man, I appreciate you.

Speaker 1 1:47:05

Yeah, happy holidays too.

Speaker 3 1:47:06

I hope you have a great Thanksgiving. Everybody listening, happy holidays, Merry Christmas, whatever holiday you celebrate.

Speaker 1 1:47:16

Yeah, everybody, enjoy holidays, man. Thanks for hanging out with us. Sorry we went a little long, but I hope you enjoyed it. All right, folks, that has been the re-released episode of Food and the Holidays, so I hope you guys enjoyed it. Once again, thanks for tuning in. Like I said, if you already listened to it before, thanks for listening again. Hope you guys enjoyed it and please feel free to hit me up with any comments, any questions, and we can talk about it here on the show. Love you all. Happy holidays, peace.

Speaker 2 1:47:51

The Lockdown to Legacy podcast is proud to be a part of the Buzzsprout Podcast Community Network. Lockdown to Legacy is recorded at Kohatch in their lovely audiophile room. Thanks for your scholarship. Audio engineering is done by our very own Remy Jones. You can reach us with any feedback, questions, comments or share the love by emailing stories at lockdown, the number two legacycom stories at lockdowntoolegacycom. You can reach out there too for a free sticker, and you can find us on Instagram and Twitter with the handle at lockdowntoolegacy and on Facebook at the Lockdown to Legacy podcast. Thanks for listening.