Getting back into the home-cooked meal
Mike Alexandre, 28, an MTA station agent, prepares chicken breasts for dinner. Photo: Ayana Osson.
Mike Alexandre warms up the stove in his small old-fashioned kitchen nook. He puts one large skillet and two smaller ones on the fire and adds olive oil. Tonight he is making one of his favorites, pork chops, and wants to eat as soon as possible. Alexandre grabs the boneless pork chops, which he has sliced into thick ovals that he doused with lemon and vinegar and marinated in a mixture of onion powder, garlic powder, paprika, Lawry’s season salt and black pepper. He likes to fry the chops first and then bake them in the oven, the most time-consuming part of a dinner that also includes boxed Goya yellow rice, canned corn and Fresh Express organic spinach.
For 28-year old Alexandre, a home-cooked meal is rare, but when he does take the time to make dinner for himself, he makes sure it is quick, tasty and healthy. Alexandre, who shares an apartment in Canarsie, Brooklyn with two roommates, grew up in a household where having a home-cooked meal prepared by his Grenadian stepmother was the norm. At seven years old he started learning to cook small meals for himself, with the encouragement of his stepmother and father, who is from Haiti. A young and experimental chef, he would use different techniques and play with textures. He remembers making what he calls “scried eggs” that were half-scrambled, half-fried. Now that he is an adult, Alexandre admits that he has become lazy with his cooking, and often cooks food out of a box, to save time.
Since Alexandre began working as a station agent for the MTA 16 months ago, he hasn’t cooked much, because he is tired when he gets home from work: he starts at 6 a.m. three days a week, at 8:30 a.m. on Saturdays and 7 a.m. on Sundays. After arriving at his designated station for the day, he sits in a booth and helps passengers who have questions or need a metro card refill. Because he switches stations every day, he does not have a sure way of eating a nutritious lunch. To make up for the lack of exercise and too much take-out during the day, he has started going to the gym four to five nights a week.
“A lot of people in my family are fat,” he said. “You’ve got to look after your health. It’d be nice to live to see my grand-kids.”
When he doesn’t cook, Alexandre orders chicken lo mien with steamed broccoli and carrots from a nearby Chinese food restaurant or tilapia with rice and plantains from Golden Krust Caribbean Bakery and Grill. When he gets home from work, he takes a nap until 6:00 p.m. and gets ready to head to the gym by 7:30. He arrives home from his workout at 10:00 p.m., eats his dinner, and then gets ready for bed.
Because of his early morning call time, Alexandre usually eats McDonald’s for breakfast, because it is the only place that is open at 5:00 a.m. and is convenient. Most days he skips breakfast and grabs food at his lunch break from a store nearby the station he is assigned to for the day. He typically works at the same rotation of stations every week, some in Manhattan and some in Brooklyn. On Tuesdays, for example, he likes to eat a hot dog wrapped in sweet bread with water and orange juice, from a store close to his post for the day, the Grand Street train station in Manhattan.
As the pork chops begin to brown, Alexandre carefully flips them over every few minutes with a fork and spoon and places them in a disposable aluminum pan to bake in a preheated 350 degree oven.
While the pork chops are baking, Alexandre begins his clean-up. He pulls out his black Beats By Dre Pill speaker and blasts a mixture of hip-hop, R&B and New Jersey club remixes like DJ Lil’ Man’s version of the Muffin Man song while he sprays the stove with Kaboom professional cleaning spray and wipes it with a blue sponge. He is not finished with the stove, but would rather clean up any spilled oil sooner than later, before it hardens. Then he boils water for the yellow rice, and heats up the can of corn in the microwave. Dirty pots go in the sink and utensils get put away. Dancing, he washes what he’s used so far, and patiently waits for his food to be finished.
Alexandre washes dishes as he goes to save time. Photo: Ayana Osson.
Less than an hour after he has started, he sits down at a small square wooden table wedged in the corner of the kitchen. The table is already set, traditionally, with a napkin, two types of forks and all. He is ready to dig in.
On another day, he makes a similar meal, substituting chicken breasts for the pork chops, with the same Goya yellow rice and eats leftover spinach. He is feeling experimental and decides to coat his pre-seasoned chicken with breadcrumbs, bake and then fry them, to see what results he gets. He uses two types of breadcrumbs, 4C seasoned breadcrumbs and Shake n’ Bake, just because.
Chicken breasts coated with two different types of breadcrumbs, yellow rice and spinach. Photo: Ayana Osson.
He carefully beats three eggs in a bowl and dips each breast into the eggs and then some breadcrumbs before placing them in an aluminum baking pan. After 35 minutes, the chicken breasts are cooked, but not as he wants them to be. The breadcrumbs have stuck to the pan, but not the chicken breasts. He is disappointed and decides there is no point in frying them.
“At least they taste good,” he says, as he sits down to eat, and bobs his head to Kendrick Lamar’s album, “To Pimp a Butterfly.”
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