The New Po' Food

When I was a very young, Mom served us po' food. Food for the poor. She was a child of the Great Depression; she'd been poor. It was the only way she knew how to cook.

Our rotating menu included: beans with a little tomato sauce and chili powder and crumbled hamburger, spaghetti, cod (she was Portuguese), vegetable soups full of overcooked kale (Portuguese, right?), S-O-S, Cream-O-Wheat, canned salmon full of bones, pea soup with ham hocks, hot dogs and white rice, pancakes or french toast for dinner. And canned peas-n-carrots at almost every meal, for some reason. Except with the pancakes.

Dad was worse. He was another Depression baby, raised poor out in the country like Mom. And then he learned to cook -- from the Marines. His talents lay in the direction of carbonized hamburgers, black-and-tan fried potatoes shiny with oil, and pureed squash.

Mom cooked poor because it was what she knew, but Dad cooked poor because he hated to spend money. Bad times had warped him, and he'd always buy the cheapest food even though money wasn't a worry. He just knew there was a wolf at the door. His cheapness actually cost him money, because some of the stuff he brought home wasn't fit to eat.

Eventually Mom had loosened up and started broiling pork chops and cooking rib roasts and making lasagne (mad impetuous thing, she). And yet the only steak Dad could bring himself to buy was still the kind that needed tenderizing with a hammer. A big hammer.

Mom finally put her foot down and took over all the shopping. As it turned out, Dad would eat good food happily -- if he didn't have to personally see the money being spent. And if nobody else ate as much as he did.

So by the time I was eight or ten we'd stopped eating like the Depression never ended. The wolf at the door ended up at the pound. And yet a taste for some of that old poor food stays with me. White rice and dogs aren't so bad, if you put enough butter on the rice. Pea soup, pinto beans, hot mush, pasta -- these are still a fairly large part of my diet. They just aren't all of my diet. I also eat a lot of fresh vegetables, which Mom never quite got the hang of.

And now, suddenly, it looks like the man in the street is getting poor again. You could argue they've been poor for years, but put off the reality with easy credit. But the credit's going, and unemployment is up, no matter what the government tells you. And so is the price of food and gasoline and and medical care and education. The only thing going down in the price of houses and the size of peoples' bank accounts.

So one of these days it may be time to ditch the fast food and frozen dinners and Starbucks and dinners out, and head back to po' food.

And this time we have an advantage my mom's generation didn't; we actually know a lot about different kinds of foods and spices. So if we go back to po' food, I'm confident that Americans will figure out a way to make that shit taste good this time around. We'll call it -- the New Po' Food. The Food Network will be all over it. Anthony Bourdain will write a book. Food and Wine magazine will have a special "Haute Po'" issue. Wolfgang Puck will open a restaurant called Noveau Po' on Wilshire in LA. Po' will be "in:" you know how America works.

Anyway, here's my contribution to the New Po' Food:

Black-eyed Pea and Brown Rice Salad

• A one-pound sack of black-eyed peas (or three cans -- wimp)
  
• Leftover cooked brown rice, cold
  
• Extra-Virgin Olive Oil
• Two or three bunches of green onions, chopped (including at least part of the greens)
• Two large (or three small) tomatoes, diced
• Dried Basil
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Grated parmesan or romano cheese
• Vegetarian bacon bits

Here's what you do:

1. Cook the black-eyed peas; oh, go on, you can do it; you're poor. Canned beans are for plutocrats who exploit the poor.
   
   
2. When cooked, drain the beans in a colander and cool them down with cold water.
   
   
3. Mix the beans and cold rice: two parts beans to one part rice. Then mix in the chopped vegetables. Add a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, or just eyeball it. Add at least a half-tablespoon of basil, and as much more as you like, and salt and pepper to your taste. Mix well.

It tastes great when served immediately, even better when kept over night. To serve, spoon it into bowls and top with grated cheese and vegetarian bacon bits. Almost every black-eyed pea recipe includes some pork-like substance, so I went with tradition; and tradition was spot-on. You can crumble up real bacon if you like, but I never do.

Black-Eyed Pea and Brown Rice Salad tastes like a good pasta salad -- Rhumba swears she can taste eggs or meat in it -- and is a hell of a lot more nourishing. Black-eyed peas have a distinctive, vegetable-like taste, and they're moister and juicier than regular beans as well.

This salad makes a good main dish with a green salad on the side, or serve it as a side with anything. Guests think it's something fancy. Don't tell them that it costs under a buck a bowl, including the bacon bits. Tell them you got the recipe from Gourmet.

The New Po' Food: Rachel Ray will be on board with it before you can say "EVOO."

The "Are You Going to Hell?" Test

Well? Are you?

Laundry Lust

I've got a delicious meal waiting at home. It's been waiting since last night, in the refrigerator. All I have to do is assemble it. And in 24 whole hours, there's been no time to do that. I had to grab a meal at a bakery tonight.

Time. We have the time to go to work and do a lot of nonsensical things that we'd never waste a second on if our lives were our own. And the things that are really important -- cooking a good meal, connecting with old friends, keeping our clothing clean and our houses in order, and simply relaxing -- get shoved into an increasingly tiny piece of our lives.

Rhumba and I are dull. We don't travel or do exciting things. We hang out around Santa Cruz and pursue our interests. Both of us had a three-day holiday weekend a couple of months back -- hope you had it, too -- and at work the following Monday, Rhumba's coworkers asked her how we'd spent it.

She thought. "Well... Boomer got through the laundry."

"He finished all of it?" "I'm down to my last clean outfit!" "I wish I could get through mine!!"

Rhumba expected wry remarks, and got envy instead. No one has time to do this stuff.

I've cracked a couple of books on Buddhism and Zen Buddhism -- okay, one of them was a comic book -- and the one concept that rings a bell for me is mindfulness. It's a form of meditation, but also a way of life. In mindful meditation you clear your mind of all thought; you observe but do not think. You simply become -- part of things. It's very calming.

Mindfulness extends to your practice of life. To live mindfully is to keep your clothing and living space clean to the best of your ability; gather food and cook meals carefully and faithfully; and to live right in the moment while you do these things, not in yesterday or next week or where you hope to be in five minutes. To occupy yourself with the task and nothing else. To become -- part of things. And then a chore stops being a chore, and simply becomes what is, and a great calm descends.

Sadly, I am not a zen master with a spotless house: I'm a bulky middle-aged man with emotional issues and a herd of dust buffaloes in the living room. But lately, I've changed my attitude towards chores. Because I've found that the more time I spend on the small things in life, the calmer I feel. Work becomes a meditation, an end in itself. I feel better -- and as a bonus I get a cleared-out closet, or a de-trashed back yard, or clean underwear.

The Buddhists have no lock on this concept. When I was young, plenty of older people felt this way about chores. I thought they were crazy. They weren't. But those were calmer times; modern life thrusts so many things at us, so quickly, that it's hard to completely dedicate yourself to any one thing for even a few minutes.

If you have the time this weekend, try a little mindful labor. Put some time aside from every other concern in your life to concentrate on one simple thing that you never get around to doing: one mantle full of dusty knick-knacks, one dirty kitchen floor, one weedy patch alongside the house, one room of dirty windows. Try it on for size. You might be surprised.

Me, I've got something special planned for Friday after work. I truly am looking forward to it:

After Rhumba and I get home and have dinner, I'm going to go upstairs to the office, close the door...

...and do the ironing.

Must Everybody Get Stoned?

Thursday, April 10: The weather changed today. As I write, the sun sits low in the west; the day's near done. But the sky is blue and the air is warm. Clear red sunlight makes the streets and people glow, and shirtsleeves are definitely an option.

Our cool, grey winter weather overstayed its welcome; but as of this afternoon it's given up the ghost and slunk off to next October, I hope. See ya.

After work today Rhumba and I headed straight downtown for a snack before going home; Rhumba has a serious letch for the cinammon crisps at Hoffman's Bakery. You could feel the seasonal change down on Pacific Avenue. Most passers-by had already shed a layer or two of clothing; if the weekend's as warm as the weathermen predict, it'll be wall-to-wall skin down there. (Note, 4/13: it was.)

Not one head wore a wool cap; instead, the First Raybans of Spring swaggered coolly down the avenue. A fresh crop of hairy young people with deep tans and giant backpacks stood here and there on curbs or corners, taking everything in. They're the vanguard of the tie-dyed and dreadlocked wanderers who head to Santa Cruz every spring and summer because it's a good warm place to crash for free by the sea and also raise a little money, and the locals are So Kew-ell, dude.

I sucked in some warm air, and smiled. There it was, faintly: that acrid, piercing smell that defined the Baby Boom and a couple of subcultures thereafter: marijuana smoke.

You see, peddling 420 on Pacific Avenue is one way that those dreadlocked wanderers make money to buy patchouli oil or new strings for their guitars or whatever. This is no big deal in Santa Cruz, where the mayor and city council demonstrated for marijuana use on the steps of their own city hall. Occasionally I see some downy-cheeked kid buying a joint off a crusty wanderer and I think, "Kid, why don't you grow it at home like your parents' friends?"

Marijuana is completely and utterly a part of the town culture, and has been for 40-plus years. There are sixty- and seventy-year-olds around who still bake the funny brownies -- and complain later that they ate too many and got wasted beyond all reason or good taste. I tell you: past the half-century mark, and they still get impatient and eat a second brownie before the first one hits? WILL THEY NEVER LEARN?

The only -- and I mean only -- wet blanket on the marijuana issue is, of all things, UC Santa Cruz itself. These days, the university does not want to be seen as a wild-and-wooly liberal arts party school, because that doesn't get you the top students or good funding. But that's kind of a little too bad, because UCSC always was, is now, and always will be UC Stoner City.

Yep, they're toking their brains out up at the university, and have been for 40 years except when there's a good crop of 'shrooms. It's a great tradition, and has been from Day 1. After all, why have a college in the forest if you're not going to head out in the late afternoon and get high under the trees:



Have a nice summer, Santa Cruz. Relax. Toke 'em if you got 'em. AND WATCH OUT FOR THE SECOND BROWNIE!

Before It's Too Late

Capitola, 2005. The grizzled reporter was so angry that he almost spit into his baby spinach salad.

"Whenever there's a high-density housing development, the neighbors go to the city council and protest on environmental grounds." His voice rose. "And it's a lie! It's always about parking and property values. And everybody knows it!"

His wife laid a hand on his arm. We were in public, dining at a venerable prom-date restaurant built into the side of a hill. My sister, a massive catalog shopper, had given Rhumba and I a gift certificate to the place for Christmas, and we'd invited our friends to help us spend it.

The reporter had seen more than a few affordable housing projects go down in flames in front of the Santa Cruz City Council, projects that could have given decent housing to cops, civil servants, teachers, mechanics. After twenty years of Santa Cruz liberal hypocrisy , he'd had enough. He didn't care much for the giant media corporation that owned his newspaper, either. And he was old, and weary, and ready to go.

So he was retiring, and the two of them were leaving the area. "We're putting the house on the market in a few months," his wife said. "We need to put it into shape first."

"Do you know where you're going to live?"

"We plan to visit a few places and see what we think," she said. "We're going to travel around the South. Oregon, too, but I think we want someplace warm." Chronic health problems laid her up for weeks at a time; she hadn't been able to work in years.

"We'll be sorry to see you go."

"We have to sell the house." Her husband shook his head. "Otherwise, we can't retire." His pension wouldn't be much, and her former employer had gone back on its promise of lifetime health insurance.

They're great people, and Santa Cruz shouldn't have lost them. But the real estate gods had decreed that their large but creaky house, one block from West Cliff and the good surf breaks, should be worth a million five. They could buy something nice for a fifth of that in cheaper climes; they had no choice.

They're in a condo in downtown St. Petersburg now, enjoying that Florida heat. We get email from time to time.

For the past ten years, everything in Santa Cruz has warped itself around the skyrocketing price of real estate: public policy, private lives, whether to grow old here, whether to raise a family here, even whether schools can stay open. Really, these crazy real estate prices have warped the hopes and fears of all of us.

2004, Pajaro Valley. The teacher's lounge of an elementary school at lunchtime. Teachers with weary faces grabbed a few moments of peace and a cheap lunch off the traveling tamale lady who'd set up shop in the corner. But in the middle of the room a circle of gleeful older women pressed in around a younger teacher who grinned from ear to ear.

Normally, all this fuss would likely mean one thing: the young teacher was pregnant. But this day, it meant something different: she and her husband had managed to buy a house. A tiny house, 'way off in the boonies. On two teachers' salaries.

She was "in." That was the cause for celebration. She'd never have to leave the county, as so many young teachers had to, to settle down or start a family. She'd never again be in danger that the landlord would raise her rent beyond her ability to pay.

The school district couldn't keep new teachers; they'd put in five years, then leave for cheaper climes. Those who really wanted to stay scanned the papers daily, hunting for a rare bargain that they might grab "before it's too late" and rising real estate values priced them out of Santa Cruz County forever.

2007, Santa Cruz. The back office of a government agency. The new mother carried her baby daughter in a sling across her chest and let the data entry clerks coo over the infant admiringly. New Mom was still on maternity leave, but had come by to visit her co-workers.

"We started looking for a house," she announced. "We can only afford something really small, but Husband can build an addition." She already lived in the boonies, so she had no problem buying a tumbledown vacation home high on a mountaintop beyond Lompico if she had to. "We've just got to get in before it's too late."

There it was, the mantra: "before it's too late." Real estate always goes up, so get in NOW. But it was 2007, and the paint was flaking off the shiny real estate boom. Stories began to appear about falling real estate sales, stalling prices, and crazy no-down no-doc loans that had made the boom possible. Possible, anyway, as long as prices continued going up and homeowners could refinance into a better loan before their first loan self-destructed and doubled their payments.

So I said, tentatively, "You know, prices are slowing down. They might fall. It might be best to wait another year."

She didn't register that she'd heard me. They bought a couple of months later.

Real estate stopped going up not long after that.

I hope she's okay. I'm afraid to find out.

2008, Santa Cruz. Today. Rhumba lured me to dinner at Engfer's Pizza after work. Down the way there's a real estate office that handles REO (real-estate-owned) houses. A REO house is one that's been taken back by the bank because 1) the house went into foreclosure, and 2) no investor was willing to pay off the loan to take the house, because the house is worth less than the loan amount. So the bank now tries to get rid of the house at a discount. There are more of these every day.

I looked in the window, and there was the usual selection of REO homes in Aptos and the San Lorenzo Valley, and especially Watsonville and Salinas, where immigrant families who thought they were leaving overpriced rentals to take the step up to home ownership got the rug yanked out from under them. And there was the notice:

"Sign up for the REO Bus!"

Yes! A bus tour of REO homes for investors who want to get a great deal on somebody else's broken dreams. Learn all about the hot new REO market and how YOU can profit!

After all, real estate always goes up, right? Take advantage now!

Before it's too late.