Surviving Graduate School: A Foodie's Memoir Part 4

There is a debate over the question: can you eat healthy when you’re poor? And, should folks receiving food stamps be able to use them to purchase sugary drinks and fatty un-healthy foods? As a professor I had a student who used food stamps and thought wow what a smart idea why didn’t I do that when was struggling to put food on the table when I was in grad school! I could not afford to eat poorly back when I was a grad student at Syracuse University in the 1990s because I knew the long term consequence to my health. I stayed with a vegetarian diet full of produce in season, brown rice, and lots of different legumes. To supplement my diet I scoured the Daily Orange, the campus newspaper, for lectures and concerts on campus with REFRESHMENTS SERVED in the advertising. I’d show up and hover around the refreshments filling up on humus, veggies, and fresh fruit particularly expensive fruit like pineapple, kiwi, and grapes all while trying to be as engaged as possible for the real reason for the event. Knowledge is the key to one’s food choices and frankly when we know better we tend to eat better. As a competitive athlete before entering grad school I wanted every edge I could get to improve my performance. Thus for years I sought out the best information possible on the relationship between health and nutrition; that information insured that even when I was temporally poor, I made informed healthy food choices. One of my heroes is former NBA player Will Allen and his work at Growing Power and NGO dedicated to getting fresh produce to impoverished communities. I highly recommend this short video about his organization.

Will Allen’s Good Food Revolution: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EpTWQWx1MQ&feature=player

Relate link on Food Stamps and famer’s markets:http://www.sweettaterblog.com/2010/02/24/food-stamps-at-fruit-stands/

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

Surviving Graduate School: A Foodie's Memoir Part 2

Hasty pudding, this and other oatmeal recipes below

After my first year in the doctoral program in history at Syracuse University (1992-1993) I moved off campus and lived with my older cousin Katie Green who I have talked about in other post http://frederickdouglassopie.blogspot.com/search?q=cousin+katie. I moved off campus to save money. I had applied for and received a Teaching Fellowship in the Department of African American Studies. The fellowship paid my tuition and provided a small stipend that I used to pay my rent, keep my 84 Honda prelude on the road, purchase books, and buy groceries. During interviews journalist often ask me what is soul food to which I respond, soul food is a fabulous-tasting dish made from simple inexpensive ingredients. Soul food is nitty-gritty food that tasted good and helped African Americans survive during difficult times. In addition I argue soul is putting a premium on suffering, endurance, and surviving with dignity. I grew up middle class but from 1993 to 2000 I lived out the definitions of soul that talk about in my work. I had just turned thirty and pride get me from calling home and asking for help putting food on my table. Instead I used every strategy I could to eat and survive with dignity which I will share over the next couple of days. The issue with me in graduate school was that I did not have a lot of time to cook, money to buy allot of food, and I wanted to eat healthy. One of the things I did was learn how cook oatmeal in a variety of ways. Here are some recipes below. I would love to hear other stories and recipes on how you or your family put food on the table during hard times.

Brown Betty recipes and more: http://frederickdouglassopie.blogspot.com/search?q=brown+betty

Hasty pudding: http://frederickdouglassopie.blogspot.com/2010/04/molasses-and-social-classes.html

Oatmeal raisin cookies: http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/oatmeal_raisin_cookies/

Surviving Graduate School: A Foodie's Memoir

Dinner rolls and soup recipes below (photo from http://www.mystainedapron.com/)

This semester I taught a course called African American History and Foodways using among other sources my book Hog and Hominy http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14638-8/hog-and-hominy/tableOfContents. It was a great class and my students wrote some outstanding papers. Grading is the toughest part of the job as a prof and the workload it creates reminds me of being back in grad school in the 1990s. During my first year in the Ph.D. program in history at Syracuse University’s (SU) Maxwell School, I lived in a graduate dorm and purchased a meal plan. The meal plan allowed me to eat well and focus on my studies. As a foodie, I can always find some reason to cook and not to work. Thus the meal card forced me to stay out of the kitchen and get my graduate work done. When I returned to campus since graduating from SU in 1985, the dining halls had become vegetarian friendly and that’s how I ate back then. The vegetarian diet made me feel allot better on and off the field; at the time I was a competitive lacrosse player gearing up to try out for the 1994 US National Lacrosse team (by the way I didn’t make it). SU’s Haven Dining Hall where I ate had a vegetarian station and soy milk on demand. In edition they had great selections of fresh fruit, cereals, baked goods, and hot delicious dinner rolls that I sliced opened and devoured with melted margarine on them. By the time my first was over, I gotten to know the staff that ran the dining hall and they looked out for me as a vegetarian; they were very nice people who I appreciated dearly. To survive outside of dining hall operating hours, after each meal I returned to my dorm room with food and soymilk from the dining hall that served as snacks during my late nights studying. I would throw the soy milk, which came in vanilla and chocolate flavor, in the small frig and freezer in my dorm room just long enough to turn them into something like a smoothie. These stashes of food and beverages, particularly those dinner rolls helped me survive more all nighters than I care to remember. Here are dinner roll recipes that would go well with the soup recipes below.

Fluffy dinner roll recipe: http://www.mystainedapron.com/2010/11/fluffy-dinner-rolls.html

Step by step dinner roll recipe: http://honeydokitchen.wordpress.com/2010/05/26/a-step-by-step-guide-to-dinner-rolls/

Sesame & Quinoa dinner rolls: http://priyaeasyntastyrecipes.blogspot.com/2010/04/sesame-quinoa-dinner-rolls.html

Various soup recipes: http://frederickdouglassopie.blogspot.com/search?q=soup+recipes

A dish I wished I Could Have Eaten: My Syracuse Lacrosse Culinary Memory

Tuscan white bean salad and grilled lamb chop, recipe below (photo from http://www.seductionmeals.com/)

During an interview yesterday a reporter asked me the question: what would your students be most surprised to learn about you? I paused and then said, they would be surprised to learn that school was never easy for me and that I never made the honor role in high school or dean’s list in college. Second, they would be surprised learn that played two national championships (losing both by the way) as member of the Syracuse University lacrosse team. Today is the last day of classes here at Babson College where I teach. If we reversed the clock back a little more than twenty years, classes would be over for me at Syracuse and the student dining hall on campus closed until the start of summer school and summer camps. As member of the Syracuse lacrosse team in 1985, I stayed on a now abandoned campus preparing for the first round of the playoff s against Rutgers University in the Carrier Dome. To my surprise, the university provided meals for us in the Goldstein Alumni and Faculty Center on campus. I argue that food is an indicator of one’s class and status in a community and the faculty dining center on campus proved the validity of that theory. The next two weeks we had breakfast, lunch, in dinner served to us in an elegant restaurant setting including white table cloths, a wait staff, and a kitchen staff that made superb food order for the lacrosse team. Now the only problem for me was I was suffering from an ulcer and team doctor restricted me to peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and few other unadorned items on the menu. Here is related recipe to a dish I wished I could have eaten back then.

Tuscan white bean salad and grilled lamb chops recipe: http://www.seductionmeals.com/2010/06/tuscan-

Easter History and Food Series: Chris Rock

Sweet potato pie, recipe below

Today is Resurrection Sunday and historically I would argue the most important day of the year for observant Christians. We received an invitation to dinner today after church and informed our host that I will bake a sweet potato pie. I saw Comedian Chris Rock on Oprah on Friday. In addition to cracking me up with his genius and funny insights, I learned that he, like me, loves sweet potato pie! Chris Rock grew up in Brooklyn but he was born in South Carolina where is mother’s family is from. Author Isabel Wilkersonhttp://wyplfmbooktalk.blogspot.com/2011/02/podcast-isabel-wilkerson-warmth-of.html

tells us that southerners followed three migration streams out of the south during the Great Migration: folks from Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas followed a West coast migration to California; some people from Louisiana and the majority who came from Mississippi went to Chicago and other parts of the Midwest like Cleveland and Detroit; migrants from the upper south from states like Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia followed an East coast migration to among other places, Philadelphia, New York, Pittsburgh, and Boston. When they relocated, Southern migrants brought with them a tradition of church membership and foods iconic to their southern roots. Easter culinary traditions differ across the southern states I mentioned above, but they all have Chris Rock’s love of sweet potato pie in common. Here are some related history and foods links and the recipe for the pie I will be sharing at our Easter gathering with folks from Virginia, Texas, the Caribbean, and Boston at the table.

Chris Rock’s Southern Roots:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fNaUwJVvk4&feature=related

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv/2008/01/29/2008-01-29_family_trees_dna_rocks_chris.html

Sweet potato pie recipe: http://frederickdouglassopie.blogspot.com/2010/11/thanksgiving-day-series-part-3-pie.html

Easter History and Food Series: http://frederickdouglassopie.blogspot.com/search?q=Easter+Series

The History Behind Easter Rituals: http://www.npr.org/2011/04/22/135632851/easter-celebrations-through-the-centuries

Easter History and Food Series: Macon, Georgia

Rice pudding, recipes below

“After the [church revival] service,” writes the Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer in 1850, then “came the dinner hour, when I visited several tents in the black camp, and saw tables covered with all kinds of meat, puddings, and tarts; there seemed to be a regular superfluity of food and drink.” Although they slept in different tent camps at this Macon, Georgia revival, black and whites attended integrated antebellum period camp meetings followed by dinner on the camp grounds. Often we associate the call and response interaction between preachers and their pulpits with African American congregations with southern roots, particularly Baptist and Methodist churches. However similarly we find similar call and response traditions in the history of predominately white protestant churches in the south. We often forgets that during the antebellum period white masters often hired preachers to come and hold services for their families which slaves attended or brought their slaves to church services, although they restricted slaves to church balconies. Never the less whites and blacks often worshiped together particularly on high holidays like Easter. Following an ornate Easter service masters allocated to their slaves both time and food for a large and elaborate meal. Here are some rice pudding recipes that remind me of the Macon, Georgia cuisine that Bremer described.

Georgia rice pudding: http://www.roadfood.com/Recipes/88/rice-pudding

Vegan rice pudding: http://cheaphealthygood.blogspot.com/2010/03/veggie-might-vegan-rice-pudding-or-what.html

Easter History and Food Series: Lamb

Kibbeh balls, recipe below

Lamb is often served as an Easter Sunday dish. In doing research for my book Hog and Hominy, I came across a very interesting lamb recipe from West Africa that I want to share. A great deal of Southern cookery has its roots in Mande culture. Mande speakers (also identified in historical documents as Mandingo and Mandinka) lived in the geographic area of the present-day countries of Burkina Faso, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, and Ghana, among others. The Mande developed distinctive special occasion dishes some of them using lamb. After the rains and harvest came, the Mande villagers feasted on meat three times a day until they completed the harvest. I found a description of a group of Mandingos that served a guest an Arab dish called kibbeh which is a ball or torpedo-shaped fried croquette stuffed with minced lamb. “So delicious did I find it,” writes traveler Theodore Canot, “that, even at this distance of time, my mouth waters when I remember the forced meat balls of mutton, minced with roasted ground nuts, that I devoured that night in the Mandingo town of Kya.” Muslim traders from North Africa must have introduced Kibbeh to the Mande people who incorporated it into their West African foodways. West Africans during the slave trade and later Arab immigrants introduced Kibbeh to the Americas in places like Brazil. Here are some Kibbeh ball recipes one traditional the other vegan that you could prepare for your Easter meal.

Traditional Kibbeh ball recipe: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18558097

Vegan Kibbeh ball recipe: http://www.messyvegetariancook.com/2009/01/13/baked-tempeh-kibbeh/

Easter History and Food Series: Collards and Creolization

Collard greens, recipes below

Africans in the colonial south did not develop their religious foodways traditions within a vacuum instead creolization occurred naturally. This is the process that happens when two or more cultures come to together and a new culture develops with elements of the original parts. Through close interaction with Native Americans and Africans, white indentured servants integrated many African and Native American cultural traditions. Each group adapted agricultural practices, religious holidays, and culinary preferences from each other. As white indentured servants and white masters adopted African foodways and slaves adopted special occasions and material culture from owners, black and white cultures in the South became more homogenous. Take for example a side dish like collard greens; the plant comes from England but its preparation in the colonial south was distinctively African. Historically Europeans in general did no eat lots of greens nor seasoned the cooked vegetables they ate with hot peppers, onions, and garlic. These plants used as seasoning came to the Americas from Asia via Africa. But today, any native born southerner, white or black, is a green eating corn bread pot liquor sopping person, particularly at an Easter Sunday meal! If you are a northerner without southern roots, that last sentenced probably has you puzzled. Here are some collard green recipes below.

Pork Seasoned Greens: http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/collard_greens_with_bacon/

Healthier Southern Greens: http://www.healthyselfandhome.com/InTheKitchen.html

Vegan Greens

Ingredients

1 bunch of greens: collard greens, mustard greens, turnip greens, kale, or chard
1 medium onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 bay leaf
¼ teaspoon crushed red pepper
1 teaspoon salt, depending on the saltiness of your stock

Liquid smoke or smoked paprika

Method:

Wash the collards good in plenty of slightly salted water, strip the leaves off the steams, discard the steams and cut the greens into small pieces. Start out with 3 bunches which will serve 6 people, they are big but they cook down like spinach. I steam mine in a pressure cooker for 10 minutes until the fibrous leaves are easy to eat. Steaming preserves the water soluble vitamins that are killed when you just boil the greens down like most of my ancestors have done for years. Remove the collards from the pressure cooker and save the water to make the pot-licker or stock. Season the water with 3 cubes of vegetable bullion, dried bay leaf, dried red pepper flakes, little vinegar, and some honey. Had some smoked paprika or a little liquid smoke which most grocery stores sell if you like that smoked meat flavor (the traditional recipe calls for a smoked ham hock or a hunk of smoked fat back). The pot-licker is full of vitamins and great seasoning for the greens Sauté the steamed greens with chopped onions and garlic in olive oil with your preferred seasonings like pepper, salt, etc. Add sautéed greens to the pot-licker and let them marinade for 30 or more minutes.

Historic Poems and Food Series: Oranges

Candied Orange Yam Empanada, recipe below

Here is another poem from the Dublin poet Jonathan Swift (1667-1745). Titled simply the “Oranges,” this poem is one in a series that Swift composed about the street venders he heard on the streets Ireland and England. I recall similar sounds when I lived in Mexico and Guatemala while in graduate school in the 1990s. My research shows that selling produce on the streets of urban centers is very old and universal often sources describe the distinctive way venders call out the poetic jingle repeat over and over again to advertise their produce. A good vender as catchy rhyme and pitch that draws you in even when you not in the market to buy something. I often find some of these modern day salespeople hawking their goods on streets corners and in spaces like Costco with great enthusiasm. It’s truly a poetic sound that that has disappeared in some spaces around the world and continues in others. Following the poem I have share a related recipe that I hope you enjoy.

ORANGES

Come buy my fine oranges, sauce for your veal,
And charming, when squeezed in a pot of brown ale;
Well roasted, with sugar and wine in a cup,
They'll make a sweet bishop when gentlefolks sup.

Candied Orange Yam Empanadas Recipe

Empanadas
1 c Goya Masarepa (use the yellow, not white!)
1/2 t salt
1½ c warm water
1 T vegetable oil
About 4 c cooking oil for frying

Candied Yams
2 medium yams
1/2 jar of orange marmalade (with rinds)
1 c firmly packed dark brown sugar
1 c orange juice
¼ t ground nutmeg
½ t ground cinnamon

Additional Necessities
1 sandwich size plastic bag, sides cut open
Wooden cutting board
Smooth bottomed juice or water glass

Method
Peel and cut the yams into 2” cubes. Toss lightly with oil and roast in a preheated 400° oven for about 20 minutes or until the yams become slightly tender. Remove from oven and set aside. In a large saucepan combine the orange juice, orange marmalade, and brown sugar and bring to a low simmer, making sure the sugar has completely dissolved. Add the roasted yams to the syrup and simmer over low heat for about 15 minutes.

To prepare the empanadas, spoon about 1/3 of the yams into a bowl along with plenty of syrup. Mash with a fork until almost smooth, adding more syrup if the yams are too dry. Follow the above procedure for shaping the empanadas, this time using the candied orange yam filling. Fry as instructed above and drain on a plate lined with paper towels. Serve with a side of extra syrup, garnish with orange zest. Makes 12 to 15 mini empanadas and about 1 cup extra yams & syrup. Recipe from http://www.poorgirleatswell.com/2009/11/foodbuzz-24-24-24-after-thanksgiving.html

Patriot’s Day and the Boston Marathon

Beef Stew, recipes below (photo from http://operagirlcooks.com) 

Today is the Boston Marathon which is run on Patriot’s Day here in Massachusetts. This my family’ first marathon and we can see the runner go pass a section of the race route from the window of our house! Needless to say, Patriot’s Day is big here in the Boston area complete with reenactments of the first battle of American Revolution in the morning and the start of the marathon later in the morning. Starting at 3 am reenactors dressed as British troops march from downtown Boston to the countryside of Lexington where the Revolution began. Some say the British may have responded in a particularly brutal undisciplined manner toward the minute men because they were tired from the long cold march in the rain and because they were hungry and wanted to disperse the patriots and sit down and eat. We have a rough estimate that the complete one day rations for a British soldier at the time of the Battle of Lexington and Concord would have included:

1 ½ pounds of Flour or Bread
1 pound Beef
½ pound of Pork
¼ pint of Pease
1 ounce of Butter
1 ounce of Rice

1 or 2 cups of Rum

Rum (although diluted with water) represented the most important part of a soldier’s rations. This was particularly true during inclement weather or a difficult assignment like a long march in the rain. The ordinary allowance was about a cup of rum and 2 cups to maintain morale during a tough assignment. Rifting off of the list of rations, here are some related recipes.

Beef stew recipe: http://operagirlcooks.com/2010/10/27/healthy-beef-stew-recip/

Vegan Beef stew recipe: http://www.myvegancookbook.com/recipes/recipe.php?id=54

Historic Poems and Food Series: Maya Angelou

Smothered Pork Chops with Collard Greens and Rice, recipes below (photo from http://www.irvinginquisition.com/)

Poet Maya Angelou was born in 1928 in St. Louis but she spent the majority of her childhood in Stamps, Arkansas. Starting in the 1970s, naturalists began investigating the role of nutrition in one’s health kicking off the modern health food/organic food movement we have today. I talk about this in the last chapter of my book Hog and Hominy http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14638-8/hog-and-hominy/webFeatures. Some called for drastically increasing the consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables and decreasing the amount of sugar, salt, fat, and red meat as doctors made the connection between food and one’s heart and blood pressure. In her 1983 poem “The Health-Food Diner” Angelou expresses her frustration with vegetarianism longing instead for the carnivore’s dishes of her childhood.

The Health-Food Diner

No sprouted wheat and soya shoots

And Brussels in a cake,

Carrot straw and spinach raw,

(Today, I need a steak).

Not thick brown rice and rice pilaw

Or mushrooms creamed on toast,

Turnips mashed and parsnips hashed,

(I'm dreaming of a roast).

Health-food folks around the world

Are thinned by anxious zeal,

They look for help in seafood kelp

(I count on breaded veal).

No smoking signs, raw mustard greens,

Zucchini by the ton,

Uncooked kale and bodies frail

Are sure to make me run

to

Loins of pork and chicken thighs

And standing rib, so prime,

Pork chops brown and fresh ground round

(I crave them all the time).

Irish stews and boiled corned beef

and hot dogs by the scores,

or any place that saves a space

For smoking carnivores.

Pork Chops with Apples and Onions: http://arkansasfoodies.com/2011/01/30/pork-chops-with-apples-and-onions/

Maya Angelou related recipes: http://frederickdouglassopie.blogspot.com/search?q=maya+angelou