Looking back at my time here in Detroit, I can't help but review memories that involve food. Our food situation has changed dramatically from the first month of living in an temporary apartment, to currently living in our house on Pingree Street. If I had to give all of us a title that represented our cooking styles it would probably be like this; Unpredictable Mike, Experimental Jon, Unmotivated Tyson, Appliable Matt and Vegan Luke. When we moved to Detroit in September, none of us had every lived in a community before outside of our families. Right away several issues had to be addressed. How would money be handled, how we would handle the personal property of others, how we would eat and cook, and so forth. We danced around a few ideas on how food should be handled. We agreed that we should have a spending budget each week for groceries, and not to put personal items towards that total. Then we settled on a schedule which had each one of us cook a meal during the week.
However, as stated before, we all had our individual cooking style, and sometimes it made for some interesting meals. While we were still at Hazelwood, we ended up making a lot of the meals together. We were still getting into the habit of things in Detroit, and almost every night we were together to help out with dinner. Luke's vegan appetite was the hardest adjustment to make. There were a few times when he made his own dinner with his own ingredients and we made whatever we wanted. But for the most part we tried to assimilate with him, making vegan dinners and using special ingredients so that we weren't alienating him. All we had to use at Hazelwood was a stove and oven, a few dull cutting knives and a cutting board. Because of our lack of kitchen utensils making dinners were sometimes hard and required a little bit more effort
Anyways we persevered until we were finally able to move into our new home. Things were looking up, or so we thought. Michael accidentally mischeduled our gas to be turned on until a week and a half after we moved in. So suddenly our food situation changed dramatically. We were now reduced to only making microwaveable dishes or cold dishes. Another crazy thing is that we didn't have cabinets put up yet in the kitchen, so all of our food that wasn't refrigerated was stored in boxes on the ground. So the week went by slowly without heat. We also had eight guest stay the night with us during one of those nights, and we felt a little bad that we didn't have a warm house for them, but we ordered a lot of food. Michael's mom, one the guest that week, saw how our food was stored, and figured that we didn't eat well or get fed enough by ourselves. That started the tradition of her always bringing food for us whenever she came to visit.
Finally, we got gas, but it came with a terrible price. We learned that the stove we had be donated was broken, and so we were still deprived of hot food aside from the microwave. We searched online and found a stove being sold for a very cheap price on Craig's List and within a few days, we finally had
a stove!
Our weekly meals
Now we could continue with our cooking. We each had our own individual cooking style which made every night a different looking meal. I wasn't a big fan of cooking big elaborate meals. I wanted as little prep and effort as possible, and so a lot of my early meals were pasta based. Matt would rarely ask for items to be bought for his meal on the grocery list because he had a habit of utilizing whatever he had around in our kitchen. Overall, Matt's meals were mainly starchy and full of beans that we would buy and never use. Jon was going through a experimental phase in his cooking life. When in doubt, Jon just used more hot peppers. His meals were hit or miss. One week he made some of the best fried chicken we had had since moving to Detroit. The next week he made pasta with a broccoli based sauce, which made me gag and we ended up ditching it completely. Matt liked it, however, but he tended to eat just about anything. Mike was very much of a wild card, because we never knew what kind of food he would present to us. And then finally there was Luke, the vegan. Luke made some interesting meals. For the most part they weren't bad, and I even really enjoyed a few of them. But some of Luke's tofu meals were not in my best interest to eat.
Free Food
Matt and our new friend Nate then introduced us to the practice of getting food from a dumpster. At first we were all very hesitate about the whole idea. Dumpster diving for food was never something I imagined myself doing. In fact I figured that the only people that really went dumpster diving were homeless people looking for anything to eat. What Nate and Matt did was still dumpster diving, but would better be described as food rescuing. Nate informed us that millions of tons of edible food is thrown out each year in the United States alone and that there was plenty of good packaged food to be found sometimes in dumpsters that wasn't opened or expired. Open to the idea of finding out what this was all about, all of us excluding Luke, went to go find food one night. The first stop was Trader Joe's. We wound up finding tons of package cheese, and fruit and other assorted goodies. We were all very careful in making sure whatever we kept was good quality and not dirty or bad because of being open in a dumpster. Matt's standards were pretty similar to ours, but sometimes we had to watch what he wanted to rescue. Michael also found a lot of flowers and he wanted to keep a few of them for later. Our next stop was to a Hostess/CVS dumpster. Initially we were looking for some goodies from
Hostess, but we ended up finding a lot of candy products that CVS was throwing away. We came about the week after Halloween, so perhaps that's the reason they were throwing out so much candy. We came home, split some of the profits with Nate since he lived in a different household. Then we reaped the rewards of dumpster diving for the first time with some real excitement. We couldn't believe how much free food was being thrown away. I think we all wanted to do it again right away, but we just didn't have any room so had to wait. I think Jon somehow calculated that we got about $200 of free food that night.
By this time I was working regularly at Jimmy John's and I was still riding my bike. I noticed that after we close for the night, we were throwing away anywhere from a few sticks of bread, to maybe 20 sticks of bread. The rules were that we had to throw them out. The logic behind it is that corporate didn't want us to keep any of the bread because it might encourage managers to bake more bread then necessary just to be able to keep it at the end of the night. So like a good employee, I would take the bread and throw it into its own plastic bag, then I would take the trash out to the dumpster and neatly and gently place the bread bag in a box on top of the other garbage. Then after work I would ride to the back of the store, and take out the bag of bread. Since I was on my bike, I had to balance it on my handlebars for the entire ride back home, but it was well worth it. There were some weeks where I would bring back so much bread that it seemed like we always had Jimmy's John bread to eat. We would eat it straight up, sometimes heat up some pasta sauce and eat it with that. Mike and Jon liked to cut it like french bread pizza, put pasta sauce, cheese and pepperoni on it and toast it. They dubbed it Pizza bread. I always enjoyed toasting it with butter and garlic making some pretty good garlic bread for my pasta meals. Now that I have a mini-van, transporting JJ's bread is a lot easier. Also, I don't have to take the bread out to the dumpster first. Just about all my managers know that I take it so they willing me ask how much I want before they throw it out.
Eastern Market
Nate introduced me to the Eastern Market, just a few miles away from Downtown Detroit. We biked there a few times during the winter since it was only about 30 minutes away if we biked well. The Eastern Market in Michigan is the largest farmers market in the country. Most of the vendors sold locally grown produce. They have just about everything you could think of being sold at a farmers market, and it was all fresh. Out of all my roommates, I visited the Eastern Market the most. Nate and I rode there a lot during the fall and winter. We would always test the limits of our backpacks with all the things that we would buy. Nate knew a lot of the dealers and was often able to get a good deal on things, such as 50% a crate of bananas because of few of them were bruised or what not. I hadn't gone for a few months until today, when I went with one of my soccer teammates. His name is Ara and he buys almost all of his groceries at Eastern Market, so its an exaggeration to say he knew a few people.
Luke's Decision and Jon's Cookbook
In the middle of winter, Luke made a drastic decision that affected our meals for the rest of the year. We were gathered around one night and Luke announced that he was no longer going to be vegan. We were all a little shocked but relieved at the same time. He said it was getting a little hard to do, and that we had done a great job of accommodating for him, but at last he said he just wanted to go back to eating regular food. This meant no more Silk Milk, and no more tofu contains and no more cheese that wasn't cheese at all. The next night we celebrated by frying up some chicken on the stove. For Christmas, Jon got a Betty Crocker cook book, and it was a little piece of heaven for the house. Jon went crazy with cooking experiments but this time he had the recipes to work with. He made some great meals and treats for all of us.
Mishaps and Praises
First of all, I will start with the praises. There have been many wonderful meals made in this house. I'm dedicating this to all those amazing adventures. To start things off, in the beginning of the year, we had a vegan chocolate cake, and even though it wasn't real diary, it was real delicious. Next was Mike's homemade ma
shed potatoes, a recipe that he got from Kat. This was a very important victory for Michael because he was needing redemption from his last meal. Jon's praises are probably the best. With his new cookbook in hand, he created some great treats. Homemade sweet tea, gingerbread, and cinnabuns. Also beer battered fried fish. Jon would stay up all night concocting something and when we would wake up in the morning he would have something delicious for us to feast on. Another praise is our 3rd dumpster diving run. It was mid winter and Luke, Matt, Mike and I were feeling like we needed some free food. Instead of going to
our normal hotspots, we tried something new. This time we were only hitting up Little Caesar's dumpsters. Whenever we went out and got pizza, we would always get Little Caesars' Hot N' Ready pizzas for only five bucks. But we heard that once those pizzas get cold, they aren't allowed to reheat them and have to throw them away. So Matt devised a seven dumpster route for us to go on and Michael drove. We came back an hour later with 15 full sized pizza's still in their boxes. We were eating pizza for about 2 weeks after that.
And finally for the mishaps. As stated before, Jon made broccoli flavored pasta sauce that made everyone but Matt gag. Michael made a batch of homemade mashed potatoes, but he let the potatoes oxidize too quickly and they turned grey. Luke made some tofu with peanut oil as the sauce, but it still didn't save the dish from the spongy texture of the tofu. And there was the one time we had bad fortune going dumpster diving. This trip to getting food was our 4th out of 5 trips and we had so many people we had to take two cars. Luke's girlfriend Kat was visiting him and Slippy, Matt's roommate from college was also visiting us. And we all wanted to go, and so did the guest because we had hyped up how much food we had gotten in the past. So we want to live up to all the talk we had been dishing out, so we went to the normal hotspots. Trader Joe's had very little and the nearby Hostess/CVS was a bust too. We didn't want to go out on a sour note so we decided to improvise. We hit up another local grocery store to find it overflowing with garbage. We didn't want to leave empty handed so we found a few more CVS's, but atlas we had no luck. With our heads hung low we ventured back home. As we were making our way back home, we were crossing through Highland Park and saw a CVS in the middle of a shopping plaza. We decided to make one last stop to hopefully get something good. We wanted to make it quick because we weren't concealed very well so I got out from Luke's car, and Jon jumped out of Mike's. Jon jumped into the dumpster while I hung over the edge shining the flashlight into it. I turned around and I saw a cop car driving by. Then to my horror it turned around and headed straight towards us. I yelled at Jon to get out but he thought it was better to just hide in the dumpster. I yelled some more and ran back to the car and got in. While Jon was just getting out of the dumpster, 2 police cars arrived next to our cars and stopped Jon. They had him come over to their vehicle and he had to put his hands on the hood while they searched him, probably looking for drugs. They asked Jon what we were doing in the middle of night at a dumpster. We couldn't hear him but he explained to them that we were looking for food. Then one officer walked up to Luke's car and another to Mike's. When they asked Luke what we were doing, he said in the most sincere voice that we were looking for candy. The officer thought we were making fun of him and started asking us more questions about how we thought he was going to believe a story like that. Then the officer from Mike's car walked over and said Mike had to told him that we were here looking for candy. Seeing that both stories checked out, they released Jon and told us never to do it again. And with that we drove back home.
a Christian Fellowship organization on campus, commonly known and abbreviated as CF. Through Christian Fellowship and the bible studies lead on campus Michael and I became great friends. We also went on two missions together, both during Spring break during school. The first year we went with a group that traveled to Baltimore and worked with Habitat for Humanity. The next year Michael lead a group of students to Atlanta to work with
buddies after college and this was my chance and I felt that this might be the only opportunity I had to get out on my own and live with people I knew. I didn't know much about Detroit at the time. I didn't know much about Jon, Luke or Matt at the time either. Samantha and I were still fresh in our relationship. I wasn't sure if we would break up or stay together. I was scared and eventually made my decision to move to Detroit without talking it over with Samantha first. I finally told her and her love and support helped encourage me to go and change the world. I was currently driver a small dodge neon, so I had no idea how I was going to transport most of my belongings 500 miles. A U-haul would cost a ridiculous amount. In the end, Samantha graciously volunteered to follow me the whole way there in her pickup and load my larger things into the back of her truck. On September 15, after saying my goodbyes to my family, I headed out to Detroit with Samantha. I didn't know where or how I was going to get a job, or how often I would be able to visit my family and girlfriend back home, but I knew that God was going to take care of me, and he allowed me to be bold. 