Surviving Graduate School: A Foodie's Memoir Part 3

Tamales, this and other Mexican recipes below

As a graduate student at Syracuse University (SU) in the 1990s, I had a $16,000 stipend to cover all of my expenses and that amount just did not get it done. As a result I had to come up with a strategy to pay the bills. One of the things I did was get a part time job selling footwear at Dick’s Sporting Goods which started as a small bait and tackle shop in Binghamton, New York in 1958. I worked at Dick’s back when it was just expanding; they had less than about five stores and no one outside of Binghamton and Syracuse ever heard of the company. Working about 20 hours a week at Dick’s helped put food on my table while I also worked as a teaching assistant in SU’s Department of African American Studies, and studied full time as a graduate student in the history department. With my meager pay checks, I restricted myself to largely sale items in the small grocery store in Nottingham just up the street from Coyne Field House on the North East corner of the university campus. When I had been gainfully employed at Gettysburg College as an interim dean, I shopped at Wholefoods Market during my weekly trips to metropolitan Washington, D. C. buying organic produce, organic breads, and other baked goods like cookies and muffins etc. Having money is about having food options; the option to fulfill one's food desires and wants and moving beyond purchasing food necessities.Syracuse had no Wholefoods and it didn’t matter because I did have the income to shop there. As a struggling doctoral student necessity turned me into a grocery store hunter tracking food items with those big orange REDUCED stickers on them. Those stickers caused me to smile because they held out hope that I could make it through the checkout line without having to put too much food back because of insufficient funds! I had recently come from living in Guadalajara, Mexico and that city’s cuisine influenced what and how I ate including making homemade tortillas. Mexican cuisine I found inexpensive to make especially if you don’t or cannot afford to eat meat. Here are some post I’ve done with lots of Mexican recipes with both traditional and vegan interpretations. Time spent living in Mexico and teaching Latin American history over my career as a prof has influenced allot of my culinary interest.

Mexican Foodways and recipes: http://frederickdouglassopie.blogspot.com/search?q=mexico

How I Became Interested in Learning Spanish: http://lacrossememoir.blogspot.com/2010/09/guadalajara-mexico-part-8-how-became.html