Prison laundries are, in fact, real places, and working there is quite a coveted job among inmates. In this case, however, I’m talking about something different. An ever bigger deal than laundry is food. And the food in the Federal Bureau of Prisons flat out sucks. Still, meals are a way in which inmates mark the passage of time and find social moments with each other. One project of this blog will be to recreate the Bureau of Prisons’s standardized menu and transform it into something regular people might want to eat instead of something inmates must eat. The food will never rise to the level of Thomas Keller’s three Michelin starred The French Laundry, but I’m trying to cook myself back to humanity after the zoo-like conditioning imposed by the Feds.
I once made a Nutra loaf (AKA meal loaf, prison loaf, lockup loaf). I can share the recipe. Or burn it. I don’t know if this was featured in this particular institution, but apparently, it’s quite (un)popular.