When far from home, what food reminds you of love or comfort? For me, it’s chicken and dumplings—something that’s hard to come by here in the Northpoint Training Center, where I have been incarcerated for nearly two decades.
Like most civilized folks, we adhere to traditions on this side of the fence. Typically, when it’s your birthday, you tell your friends what you want, and they buy the food, do the cooking, and even wash the dishes—and you let them. It’s what friends do.
But when my birthday rolled around last year, I wanted to be the one to cook and share one of my favorite meals with my friend, Derek Trumbo. But first I had to gather the ingredients.
Sometimes incarcerated people have to break the rules—and this includes breaking the rules to make a living inside. This is something Trumbo wrote about. He even highlighted my hustle as an artist. So if I wanted to have a memorable birthday while imprisoned, I had some work to do buying, borrowing, and obtaining pilfered ingredients for the meal.
I’m a bit of a rebel, so leave it to me to do birthdays differently. I kept the whole thing a secret and didn’t even tell Trumbo I was planning my own birthday meal.
Cooking in prison isn’t at all like cooking in your home kitchen. There are very different rules, and it’s a very different setup. We don’t have ovens; we only have access to microwaves. Secondly, you can’t leave anything behind that might incriminate you—and that includes ill-gotten ingredients. You have to eat everything.
Here’s the list of ingredients for my chicken and dumplings, along with how I obtained each item:
2 boxes of frozen Banquet fried chicken (from the commissary)
1 lb of flour/biscuit mix (an ill-gotten good from the slightly shady guy who works in the kitchen)
1 onion (borrowed)
Salt and pepper
1 tbsp parsley (you gotta love that kitchen guy)
Lots of water
As much love as you can pour, mix, fold, and stir in (trust me, it makes the difference)
To make the recipe work, I also needed a large bowl, some smaller ones, and a garbage bag. Don’t worry, I’ll explain along the way. All will be revealed.
Now we prepare the meal. This is where the real work starts.
First, you have to clean your prepping and cooking area. Prison is filthy, so this is step number one.
Next, you must dismantle the chicken by shredding the crispy skin and the chicken meat, setting them aside in one of the smaller bowls I mentioned. Don’t throw away the fat, bones, and gristle! You place these items into the big bowl with approximately two quarts of water, and you boil it in the microwave to create your chicken stock. This step takes about 25 minutes.
While you wait, cut up the onion. There are no knives in prison, so figure it out. Once the stock’s done boiling, remove it from the microwave and strain out all the solids. Now add another 2-3 quarts of water to the stock. Remember that chicken meat and crispy skin you put aside at the beginning of this fiasco? Add it to the stock with the onion, salt, pepper, and that ill-gotten parsley from the kitchen. Return the stock to the microwave and bring it to a boil.
While waiting for that stock to boil, it’s time to prepare the dough for your dumplings. Some prison commissaries sell eggs and milk, some don’t. On this side of the fence, we just use water and flour or biscuit mix, depending on what the guy in the kitchen can smuggle out. You need to sprinkle some flour or mix on your countertop before starting the dumplings or you’ll never get the dough off the surface.
Now put the dry ingredients in a bowl and slowly add water, mixing until it’s the consistency you want. Dump your dough onto your floured surface for the fun part: rolling out the dough. You might have already guessed there are no rolling pins in prison. I use an old plastic container. I mean, it’s round, right?
Roll out the dough until it’s about a quarter of an inch thick, and then cut into one-inch squares. Don’t get too fussy about it. All imperfect dumplings will still be eaten, and those doing the eating will not deduct points for presentation. We’re in prison, for goodness sake.
Now that the dumplings are ready, remove the boiling stock from the microwave and gently drop in the dumplings one by one. Stir as you go to keep the dumplings from clumping together. Once the dumplings are all in, it’s back to the microwave.
Our microwave only works in six-minute intervals, so after every six minutes I remove the bowl from the microwave, give it a stir, and then microwave it again for another six minutes. I repeat this process about 20 times until the dumplings are fully cooked. Seriously.
To be clear: 20 six-minute cycles aren’t needed, but there are 50 men who live in my wing, and there are only two microwaves. This means that every few minutes or so, I took my chicken and dumplings out of the microwave so others could use it to make a cup of coffee. This is part of the prison culinary experience. You just have to embrace it.
In all, the total cook time for the chicken and dumplings once the dumplings are actually in the stock is about 20-30 minutes. But the dumplings will determine this; not you. It’s time to stop the microwaving when the dumplings begin to firm up and are almost fully cooked.
This is where the garbage bag comes in. We’re not animals in here, so of course it’s a clean, unused garbage bag, and I use it to cover the almost-ready chicken and dumplings to keep the dust out. Then I wrap towels around the bag. Why, you ask? Wrapping the bowl in towels holds heat, allowing the contents to continue cooking until the dumplings are fully done. As the food slowly cools, this also ensures that the stock thickens thanks to the flour in the dumplings. I learned all of this through trial and error, though mostly through error.
Now it’s time to eat. Gather your friends—in this case, Trumbo—and ladle out servings. Before you ask: No, there are no ladles in prison. (Are you sensing a theme here?) I use the smaller bowls I mentioned earlier. My favorite step of the whole cooking process is finally getting to sit down with the people I cherish and enjoy their company (and even some of their quirks) over a good meal that, under normal circumstances, we would never get in here.
When I sat down to eat with Trumbo, I asked him to humor me a bit by not talking for the first few minutes of our meal. Instead, I wanted him to breathe in the aroma of the food and close his eyes while he chewed his first bite. I wanted us to clear out the junk in our minds and just be in the moment.
For those few moments, it was like neither of us was inside anymore. This bowl of lovingly prepared food transported us. I was able to get my friend out of prison, if only for a little while. There is no better way to spend a birthday than that.
Afterward, we ate in silence for a bit, both of us still in our own minds, remembering what freedom was and what family meant. Remembering what comfort felt like. Life before prison.
For my birthday, I broke the rules. I bought and cooked my own meal, which allowed me to escape my prison and also bless my friend with a short break away. For a little while, we were home. Almost, anyway.
It might not sound like much to you, but I consider this birthday a memorable one. I was able to let my friend know that I love him, that he matters, and that he—and we—are worthy of happiness.
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