Poor People Cook the Best Food

I don't do restaurant reviews very often but todays lunch warranted as much publicity as I could give it.

My wife took me to lunch today but the place we planned to visit wasn't open so instead we meandered across the street to a little place my friend recommended a while ago- Dominic's Jamaican Restaurant. While I was initially disappointed that our first choice was closed, I wound up being extremely happy with the runner-up.

Let me begin by saying that many folks will not read this and then go there because of it's location which is right in the middle of the hood, but I urge you to overcome your fear of lower income neighborhoods and I assure you you will be rewarded. This place has little to offer in the way of ambiance but the counter service was very nice and appreciative of my praises.

The wife and I each made our choices from their small but fairly varied menu, for her the Jerk chicken (she stole my thunder!) of course she got it with white meat (silly girl!), and to accompany it she chose the fried plantains and cinnamon yams which were a great compliment to the spicy chicken which was cooked on the bone as it should be. The plantains were soft and very sweet, most likely from very yellow or almost black plantains, delicious! As for myself, since I was left to order outside my standard Jerk, I went for the Brown Stew Chicken (not available in white meat). To accompany the stew I chose the peas (black eye) and rice and some fried dumplings which our server brought out some magical salsa in which to dip them. The stew was in my own words-fucking amazing! It was all dark meat chicken cut into small chunks served on the bone not that you could keep it on there since it was so tender. It was stewed perfectly so that even the smaller bones softened, I think I ate about half of them only pulling out the larger ones. The sauce was a rich deep brown-mahogany color and just thick enough to coat the meat without becoming thanksgiving gravy and intermingled with the chicken were sprigs of fresh thyme, allspice berries, potato and chunks, that's right CHUNKS of fresh ginger. There wasn't any heat to the stew which made the wife even more jealous when I finished it all. The salsa that I mentioned, I would never have dipped fried bread (except tortillas) into salsa before today, but they recommended it so i did it and I will be doing it again in the future, especially at this place. The dumplings were essentially hush puppies which were great by themselves but the salsa set it all in motion. It looked like a basic pico de gallo with tomatoes and onions and such but there were little bits of yellow that may have been very ripe mango, I'm not sure and I really don't care so long as I can get it the next time.

I am happy that this place isn't any closer to home because I would become even more poor and much fatter, I may be a white boy raised in Columbus but this is the food I was made to eat. You can keep your over frenchified suburban bistros and your well manicured haught cuisine establishments, I'll take the poor folks food every time, it's about simple pleasures, making the most out of what you've got and Chef Gotty is rockin that shit like a bad ass blues jam!

13 to Life

I recently viewed a video post from youtube called "the girl who silenced the world for five minutes" and I was impressed to say the least. I don't think I've ever seen or heard a preteen speak with such intelligence, and conviction about anything more important than what color pants to wear to school. This young lady makes some heavy points and conveys her concerns without sounding like a jerk. She most likely had a bit of help from someone older than the few twelve to thirteen year old colleagues that she mentions, but still, she composes herself like an adult and never seems to be intimidated by the presence of all the diplomats to which she is speaking. That being said, I now want to change the focus a little.
What were you doing at thirteen years old? What occupied your thought time? I think that's when I tried my first cigarette and REALLY became interested in girls. Aside from that I spent most of my time listening to music and riding my BMX bike around the neighborhood. The point is, neither I or anyone that I knew was thinking about anything remotely as important as this girl and her friends. It made me look at my own daughter, only nine years old and she frequently is forced to muscle her way through migraine headaches, she is concerned that the food she eats was raised ethically and is periodically annoyed at how "boys get all the cool stuff". Don't get me wrong, she spends plenty of time just being a kid i.e. playing and having fun, but you see the point here.
We are making choices that we believe will enhance our lives, increase our comfort, and boost our bottom lines, we look at the future through money tinted glasses. We are failing to see the impact that the choices of ourselves and our predecessors is going to have on our kids. The popular form of thought seems to be that we can't make a difference, we can't fix things, they're too broken. To some extent that is true. We can't fix everything, we can't turn everything around, but we can make a difference, we can do something.
We cannot leave all our problems for our children to fix and we cannot leave them ill equipped to make better choices. What parent doesn't want their kid to have a better life than they did? Judging by the way we steward our world, none of us do.
We have changed the world in such a way that we are slowly stealing childhood from our kids, forcing them to worry and wonder about what comes next.
What we need to work on is teaching them by example, not just telling them but showing them how to better care for themselves, the people around them and the world they live in, maybe then they won't continue to break what they can not fix.