The Tex Mex Hex, or Oliver Twist for the 21st Century

I used to be OK with eating Tex Mex food on a regular basis. Not any more. This proves that prison has consequences. After eating pretty much nothing but apples for fruit for five years of incarceration, I’m hesitant to bit into one now, no matter how good they might be. The same goes for Tex Mex food, but the aversion is even stronger.

It’s not such much that the Tex Mex was terrible in prison, although there was some dishes, if you can call them that, which really did approach the abysmal lows of subsistence sustenance. What really put me off was having so damn much of it, and having it be so, how should i put this, “unappetizing.” About 20% of the meals served in federal prison are some variation on Tex Mex, putting me in mind of Oliver Twist’s steady diet of gruel. Like the residents of Dickens’s parish workhouse, we inmates more of less gobbled down the Tex Mex, after all we were, also like Dickens’s children, “desperate with hunger and reckless with misery.” But even if we weren’t as hungry and miserable as Victorian orphans and delinquents, a steady diet of Tex Mex quasi-gruel certainly had the effect of wearing down our humanity. This could be accomplished with any food; there’s nothing particular to ethnicity at play here. You could suffer a breakdown from eating boxed mac and cheese on that schedule. And Morgan Spurlock pretty much blew himself up eating McDonald’s for 30 days. I even understand that some people are one-note eaters, ingesting the same stuff week after week with apparent comfort and glee. Not me, however. Mentally — and physically — I do better with a varied diet that can be enjoyed with some half-decent company. It beats government kibble wolfed down among people desperate to be anywhere else. It’s no wonder, in those circumstances, that prison medical staff is so eager to diagnose every inmate malady as GERD. The daily reality of prison supper is this: 1500 inmates are herded through a dining hall with a maximum capacity of 300 in 90 minutes or fewer. If people are still there eating at the end of those 90 minutes, there’s a lot of guards yelling threatening, and on a bad day, the staff might even decide to lock you up in solitary for lingering. In some ways, those 18 minutes to eat might not be such a bad thing; speed numbs the gustatory experience. Still, it’s really just fattening time on the factory feed lot. If, for some reason, you want more of the Tex Mex gruel, it is possible to go ask a guard if you may go through the line again, but the answer is always “no,” no matter how many leftovers they are going to toss that day. It seems the BOP training manual was the same one used by Bumble and Limbkins in Oliver Twist who, when Oliver asked for more gruel, had this reaction: “Oliver was ordered into instant confinement; and a bill was next morning pasted on the outside of the gate, offering a reward of five pounds to anybody who would take Oliver Twist off the hands of the parish.” Such basic human impudence cannot go unpunished. You can also just try to sneak back through the line again (if they aren’t scanning IDs), though that’s also a punishable offence which causes our latter-day Bumbles and Limbkins to opine, in the words of Dickens, “The boy will be hung…I was never more convinced of anything in my life.” By the way, you know they trash quite a bit of food because some portion of what they didn’t always shows up on the cell block black markets within 45 minutes of the end of every meal, and if you ask people who clean the pots and pans as their prison job, they can give you a very accurate inventory of what they put into the garbage as well.

But I really wanted to talk about the Tex Mex Hex: that is, how I having trouble even thinking about that cuisine without getting a bit of a knot in my gullet. This is particularly bad because: a.) my spouse really enjoys Tex Mex and b.) I actually live in an area that has lots of well-above-average Tex Mex dining options. How am I to get back on the horse, so to speak, after being bucked off by the Bureau of Prisons for 12 meals a month, 5 years in a row? Short answer: Rick Bayless. Thank God for that Mexican-cooking gringo genius. His roasted tomatillo enchiladas have me dipping my tongue back into the TEx Mex palate. You can find the recipe I riffed on here: https://www.rickbayless.com/recipe/roasted-tomatillo-enchiladas/ . Part of the beauty of Bayliss is that, as you will see, he’s not especially fussy or authoritarian about his recipes, but he’s solid enough on the basics that your food comes out tasting good. This recipe isn’t that difficult, either; why, even prison cooks could make it easily, but now I associate it with a pleasure of life outside the razor wire. Because I’m an unashamed, felonious pig, I made the enchiladas with both chicken and cheese, and as far as I’m concerned, Bayless’s most important tip has to do with the chicken. Pull it off a store-bought rotisserie or home-roasted bird unless you want a true prison experience. If you want prison food, make sure you find a way to dry out the chicken as much as possible, throw on some minimal seasoning and forgo any more than a couple tablespoons of sauce. Yeah, you’ll be sticking with Bayless.

The Tex Mex Hex isn’t yet entirely broken, but at least I’m on the way to eating broadly again. It just takes a while to get over “burritos” and “chicken tacos” that would make Taco Bell cringe with shame. After all, in prison when they occasionally served the frozen, pre-packaged burritos that you can get at every grocery, that was a major treat and relief.

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