Herbs & Poverty

Today I got to use parsley and basil in my garden for the first time. I mixed them in with my tuna salad for dinner today. Just basic tuna salad. I mixed in some green onions for good measure, and that was it.

However, the parsley and basil were fresh with the green onions. The flavors were shocking to me because it’s been so long since I have had ready access to fresh herbs.

This is what happens when you were steeped in poverty when you were young. I was on my own by the time I was 16, and for reference, once I spent $10 for 2 cases of top ramen and damn near gave myself scurvy because it’s all I ate for three months. Not because I wanted to, but because I was a teenager trying to problem solve not starving to death.

I just didn’t have the education to know what to do with food. It’s not that my family, before I was on my own, were poor. They were anything but, yet their food decisions weren’t really big on fresh raw vegetables and home cooked meals. My mother’s cooking nemesis was the box brownie mix. We either chiseled it out of the pan half burnt, or used a spoon.

My first experience with real fresh well cooked food was when I worked at The Black Cat in my home town. It was a four star restaurant, and I learned the basics of cooking that would put me into the kitchen in every place I worked until my mid-twenties.

When I was 16, I wasn’t even sure I would get food the next day, and I certainly could not have imagined owning a home, and having an honest-to-god food garden.

I also feel like a proud father because my mint plant is blooming.

That manky Trader Joes mint is finally taking off. You know what that means? My mint jelly dreams will be coming true next year. Not to mention the cocktails. Don’t worry. It’s contained in its own 2 foot raised bed. It can have that bed, and no more! If it bleeds into the lawn? It’ll just smell good when I mow.

Cutting up that basil made me grateful all over again that I even got this chance to do this. There’s no way I could in an apartment. Sometimes I think about how far I came from that homeless street rat, and it’s hard to believe. I’d have never believed I could come this far back then.