Doctor Strangebreakfast: or how I learned to stop worrying and love poverty (Part 2)

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"Write Now Wednesdays" is the day I take time to explain facets of Burrito Life or expand opinions touched upon in previous articles. This week we present the conclusion to last week's story by guest contributor, Devon Ashby.

These tortilla-wrapped masterpieces typically contained cheese – Havarti was a favorite when affordable, but shredded cheddar was my fallback. If it was really a hard-up week, different wet ingredients were substituted for the cheese (or added, just for the hell of it). Chorizo was my standby meat ingredient — beef, pork, cured and uncured – but bacon, diced ham, sausage in its many glorious forms, and even soyrizo all made appearances. The Beverly Discount Market at the end of our block routinely stocked 6-count bags of fresh tortillas, delivered from a bakery just a few streets up, so all I had to do when I ran out of wrappers was put on my shoes and walk to the corner. Other rotating guest stars included black beans, red beans, garlic cloves, fresh cilantro, avocado, rice of many colors and textures, grilled peppers, fresh and stewed tomatoes, and an impressive array of hot sauces and salsas.
 
To this day, breakfast burritos are an important signifier for me, and they’re special for a couple different reasons. I didn’t have a car and there was never enough money for gas anyway, so the frequent need to replenish my stash of ingredients forced me to actually leave my house and explore my own neighborhood. I was living right outside Koreatown in Los Angeles, an area dominated by Guatemalan and Salvadorean small businesses. By going out on foot so many times looking for shredded cheddar or chorizo, I realized that my neighborhood was a fucking goldmine – not just of fresh tortillas, chicharonnes and Guatemalan pastries, but of huge, gorgeous painted mural art. I spent whole afternoons just hoofing up and down the street, gawking at DIY signage for various toy stores, religious icon emporiums, electronic repair shops, and carnicerias, and occasionally wandering inside to examine stacks of 30 year old video game cartridges or mirrored, glass-protected displays of false teeth.

A tortilla stuffed with cheese, meat, and vegetables isn’t the healthiest food on the planet, or the most technically sophisticated. But the cheapness, availability, and raw creative potential of my ingredients usually added up to a pretty happy medium between flavor, nutrition, and affordability. This was the first time in my life I had to make choices about how to manage my resources and take care of myself, and coming home to a meal cooked in 10 minutes that flooded my tastebuds with ecstasy, contained fresh vegetables, and could be held with one hand while watching Jeopardy was one of the few recurring experiences in my life that made me feel I might actually be capable of someday getting my shit together.
 
Most importantly, without fully realizing what was happening, I had the chance to get really good at something, just by doing it over and over again, while still leaving myself some room to play around and experiment. This is probably the most important skill set I’ve ever learned, and the rest of my life’s formative experiences have pretty much just been variations on that same theme over and over again. Breakfast burritos taught me how to be an artist, and how to be an adult. I salute them.