The Thrill of the Meatball

Yesterday I made spaghetti from leftovers, and rejoiced. I'll try to explain why.

The point is, when I was urban-homeless, making spaghetti from leftovers was almost impossible. Oh, yes, there were leftovers. I might have been able to eat at a free community meal, and they might have had something like what I fixed three days ago that "seeded" the spaghetti. In fact that had been just exactly the sort of food I've gotten at free community meals.

Being poor, I went to one of those stores [see their talking cartoon head] where they specialize in selling me packaged foods that haven't been fully unloaded from their boxes. Since I don't mind the clutter, I reap the savings! Such aesthetic neglect netted me 12-ounces of meatballs PLUS two red bell peppers for half what the meatballs alone would have cost me in a neater store. I already had an unmarked pound of white rice of undetermined extraction from a food bank. Pearls? Peewees? I had 49-cents worth of tomato sauce and a yellow onion.

The seed meal was that. A rice-meatball-tomato-sauce-onion event. I'm not a great cook. I collect ingredients to critical mass and combine with heat. Nevertheless, cooking is extremely important to me. Assembling my own food for my own consumption is a sacred act, even if I do it badly, whether the results are edible or not.


[Shown: The sacred cranking of chickens during the 15th Century]

Speaking of sacred acts, when I'm dead I want everyone to eat domestic Limburger in memory of me. You don't have to do it every year. Once would be sufficient.

Actually, I was cooking as usual for both myself and Anitra "On Whose Kitchen Floor I Have Sometimes Slept" Freeman. Cooking food for her own consumption is NOT so sacred an act for Anitra, so I get to do most of it and hog all the cooking sacredness to myself, while she does sacred emails.

Even with both of us eating it, the rice-meatball-etc. event would not disappear. The meatball-onion-sauce was half leftover. As I said, this could also have happened at a community meal. They use cheap ingredients too. If Anitra and I were still homeless we could have been at one of those meals and could have each had a half serving of meatball-onion-sauce left over, which we might have dumped into a container and saved.

Then, we could have done much of what I did later. Since more sauce was needed for spaghetti, we would have obtained a can of spaghetti sauce. I got mine this time at a food bank. When we were homeless we would have got the spaghetti sauce with food stamps. Since garlic was essential, we would have bought one bulb of that vegetable variety, peeled it, and stuck slices of it in our extra sauced leftovers, using a sharp knife. I always had a sharp knife when I was homeless.

Then what? The directions for making the spaghetti now call for the heating of the meatball-laden sauce so as to mellow the garlic and disseminate its flavor, and to cook up a pot of spaghetti to put the sauce on. This means boiling water.

Ouch. The army has heating pads for MREs that we could have used in theory to heat the sauce, but they wouldn't boil water. Well, we could have built a fire. But you'd be surprised how quick the police show up when you build an illegal fire anywhere in the city limits. They come the quickest when you're hungry or cold.

You'd think the military would hurry up and come up with a flameless heater that our soldiers can use to boil water, as opposed to just heat stuff up. I mean, we've got a war every minute, let's put our wars to good use, spurring the technology that will make being homeless bearable, since we will be draining our country's resources to make so much of it.

Then those of us in housing won't be the only ones who get to enjoy the thrill of making spaghetti from leftovers.

[Pictured at right: Life's goal achieved!]

Chuck Grammar

Let’s chuck grammar in the bin, why not? Speech parts of? Needs them who?!

And while we are thinking about that, we’ll give a thought to writing a poem that expresses the thought we’re thinking.

Whoa, wait a sec! We weren’t thinking a thought, actually, were we? Well, OK, let’s think of something, and then color it, so to speak, with the sentiment previously touched upon (eeeww).

What I’m thinking about is the plight of Eastside Earl (not his real name). This is a guy you can see daytimes in the U District, even at the U itself, reading books. Say you see him reading a book, and you walk up to him, and you say, “Hi, what are you reading?” If he looks up and says “a book” and then goes back to his reading, it’s a fairly good sign that it’s him.

An even better indication would be no answer at all. Earl is at home with books but can barely relate to human society at all. That’s why, although he’s clearly mentally ill, he’s never checked into the welfare system, because that would entail talking to people. That’s also why every evening, instead of checking into a downtown shelter, Earl rides a bus to the Eastside. To a patch of not-yet-developed land not yet as crowded with homeless as Seattle’s “jungle” and therefore not nearly as likely to be bulldozed, or even visited.

Of course like all people who “work” in Seattle while residing in Bellevue or Redmond or Kirkland or whatnot, Earl pays a price. Prior to June 1, Earl’s price was $2.20 per day. He’s been paying for that and his food and other expenses with money obtained from clearing the alleys and sidewalks of the U District of littered aluminum cans. But “rent” has gone up for Earl. Thirteen percent.

This poem is inspired by Earl, and I am sure that it is one that he would particularly despise.

Bus Burdened Eastside Earl

by © Dr. Wes Browning

Thank Earl’s bent back no cans out back

blackberry ladens, they’re laden less since him

His peace vines fruit quiet, daily

But busses burden Eastside Earl.

Oh, sure we all zone twice or twice again

-- Earl’s got nothing we elsewise lack

Hell, Earl’s got nothing.

But come June the first,

he’ll be bus burdened Eastside Earl,

by thirteen percent the worst.

This being the 1998 Real Change Food Issue, allow me to waste valuable space and time by discussing some of my own favorite culinary tips for the street-weary.

The last time we did this I got honorable mention for my limburger-burger suggestion. That was a utilitarian repast, designed less to be eaten than to seize territory. Whole parks could be claimed just by making one limburger-burger.

Here is another helpful hint from the Homeless Gourmet, and one that is not at all original to me: always, always, carry a bottle of hot sauce with you to those soup kitchens. Earl carries one. You need one, too. You want to be able to eat the food without necessarily having to taste it. With sufficiently many repeated applications of this suggestion you might even spare yourself from having to taste anything ever again. This greatly simplifies cooking all around and makes coming up with new satisfying recipes a cinch.

Earl reminds me of one more way to improve an otherwise lack-luster meal. Everywhere you go you can find “empty” beer cans. This is even more true than ever thanks to the drive to eliminate 40-ouncers from the shelves of downtown stores.

Now a nice thing about aluminum, as opposed to glass, besides being worth more per pound, is that aluminum is opaque. As a consequence, upon close inspection you will discover that these cans almost never get completely emptied by their original owners. Their contents can be saved in a jar to provide an interesting and enjoyable addition to sauces and gravies and even soups.

I especially recommend stale beer & sardines. Add a half dozen shakes of hot sauce, a little bit of ketchup, and sop it up with bread. It’s got your grains, your carbohydrates, your vegetables and your protein. And thank you Seattle for making it so much easier to round the ingredients up!