Prison Ramen: Recipes and Stories from Behind Bars Read Online Free Page A

be easily smuggled back to the cell. It helped deal with those late-night hunger pangs.
    The Jailhouse Hole Burrito is a monster,
my
monster. And let me tell you something, eating this monster was work. To “celebrate” my hundred days, I’d made it so big that I had to attack it like an athlete. Halfway through this particular incarnation, I looked like I was on an episode of
Man v. Food
, and food was winning. I was sweating, and my vision began to tunnel. Between every bite, I was gasping for oxygen like a dying fish. But I made this monster, so I was going to eat it.
    I woke up the next morning sick to my stomach. I hadn’t eaten that much crap food in a long time, and frankly I was relieved to have survived the ordeal. All I remember from the night before is lying on my bunk in the Ventura County jail, crawling under the sheets and slipping into a food coma. I think if someone had shanked me in the belly that night, I would have exploded Cheetos-flavored Ramen onto them.
    I invite you to enjoy this as much as I did, and to recover quickly.
    Roger Avary is the Academy Award–winning screenwriter of
Pulp Fiction
,
Silent
Hill, and
Beowulf
. He directed the crime thriller
Killing Zoe
and the teen drama
The Rules of Attraction
. Avary supports projectavary.org , dedicated to improving life outcomes for at-risk children with parents in prison.

Avary’s Jailhouse Hole Burrito
    Ingredients
    1 pack Ramen (any flavor)
    Hot water
    1 large bag (about 8 ounces) jalapeño popcorn (or any bag big enough to hold your ingredients)
    ½ cup hot sauce
    About ½ cup squeezable cheese (jalapeño flavor is popular, but any squeezable cheese is fine)
    Handful of cheese crackers
    Handful of Takis, Doritos Dinamita, or other spicy rolled chips
    1 small bag (about 1 ounce) Cheddar Jalapeño Cheetos, or any spicy flavor
    1 large flour tortilla
    1. Bust up the Ramen in the bag. There’s a jailhouse trick for this, to avoid damaging the bag: Hold the bag of Ramen flat in your palm and with firm but gentle force, throw it flat onto the ground. Repeat this on the other side.
    2. Carefully open the bag by one of the top sealed edges, so it forms a pouch.
    3. Remove the seasoning packet. Gently and neatly tear off the top of the foil pack and twist it to create a twist tie for the Ramen bag. Set aside both the open seasoning packet and the twist tie.
    4. Pour about a cup of hot water from your sink (which is probably lukewarm) into the Ramen bag. Don’t fill it all the way.
    5. Twist the bag closed and tie it with the twist tie you created from the seasoning packet.
    6. To create a vessel to mix your other ingredients, empty out three-quarters of the popcorn from your large bag. Save that popcorn for later.
    7. Take the bag with the remaining popcorn and add the hot sauce, Ramen seasoning, ¼ cup of the cheese (about half), the cheese crackers, and the Takis.
    8. Crush up your Cheetos in the bag until they resemble the size of hamburger meat. Add to the mixing bag.
    9. Squeeze the rest of your cheese onto a tortilla, slathering it like sauce on a pizza.
    10. Drain your Ramen, if necessary, and add to the larger bag. Mix.
    11. Now place the fluorescent orange concoction on your prepped tortilla and roll it up, folding the bottom first like a burrito.

Don’t Forget the Birdbath

    Y ou might think that inmates are a bunch of angry, smelly men. And sometimes we are. But I will say this, we do attempt to keep clean—for our own benefit as well as those around us. When we’re in a lockdown, cellmates might have to spend weeks, even months, in the cell together. We don’t go out or get any air at all and we get only one shower per week. But there is a convict rule that is strictly enforced—by the convicts. Everyone takes a daily birdbath.
    While your cellmate stays out of your way on his bed, you fill the sink with water. You can even use the toilet water if you must, but that can be kind of depressing because most of the plumbing is