I always enjoyed cooking growing up. I would spend days searching cookbooks for recipes I could make with the ingredients I had. You could say I was a little fat boy on a mission to satisfy a major sweet tooth.

As a young food connoisseur, I loved watching my father and mother cook. I learned from them until I could cook meals on my own, which for me was third grade. The next year, I cooked everything for Thanksgiving because my mother had the flu. I remember running into her bedroom to ask what recipe to use for the pie crust.

This industriousness has been put to the ultimate test since I got locked up in 2013. In prison, cooking requires unorthodox methods. All the ingredients you once used do not exist, and the food available is ultra-processed. Prison is one of the most extreme kinds of food deserts. 

But the limited ingredients sparked my curiosity and challenged me to make something amazing out of very little. Over the last decade, other residents have helped me discover different ways to prepare food.

Chef school

A “hot pot” is basically the only way to cook in a Texas prison. All my cooking has been in my cell, or in the dayroom on holidays. 

What I call a hot pot looks like a water pitcher with a heating element on the bottom. There is one type of hot pot available for us to buy: an electric kettle that limits how hot the water gets. 

With a hot-enough kettle and creativity, you can cook like you would in a pot on a stove. 

Many people encouraged me to write a cookbook, but that seemed impossible. I had tried to order prison cookbooks, but most of them got denied because their content was not allowed by the state.

That’s why I’m so proud to have published my own cookbook in August 2023: “Hot Pot Chef: Texas Prisons Cookbook,” which is prison-friendly. 

One complaint about prison recipes is that no one measures anything — we don’t have standard kitchen measuring instruments. My cookbook avoids that problem. I used simple items for measuring, such as a spoon or a hot pot lid. 

I also made sure my recipes only contained foods sold in the prison commissary so my book would not get banned. 

How to cook good and healthy food in prison was my dual mission, which is hard to do. I included the amounts of calories and protein in each recipe and a calorie chart for food served in the chow hall.

Cooking in community

Writing my book was a challenge. Lots of research was needed and after writing all the recipes, I still had to edit. When you hear someone say 90% of writing is editing, believe it. 

I am blessed to have a family who was willing to help. My sister made a recipe from the book and took the beautiful picture that became the book’s cover. My mom and grandma helped edit, format and publish the book through Amazon. It has sold more than 500 copies so far.

The publishing process took years of self-education. Nothing in life will jump out and tell you how to do it — you have to dig, learn and study to understand how.

Writing and publishing has been the most liberating thing I have ever done in prison. Setting a goal and finishing it has changed my life and given me a voice when the world tried to shut me up. 

The recipe on the cover of “Hot Pot Chef” is the tuna chino bowl. For years, people paid me to make chino bowls because I have refined the recipes and techniques so that every dish would surprise them. 

If you have figured out how to imitate the complex sweet-and-sour dish, you have cracked the code to being a chef in prison. “Chino bowl” is slang for Chinese food, much of which is sweet and spicy, like the recipe below. This dish has a nice orange tang and savory flavors.

Here is that recipe and two more from “Hot Pot Chef.” 

I hope this article has inspired my fellow jailbirds to rise up and produce a work of art.

TUNA CHINO BOWL

• 1 veggie soup
• 1 pack veggie soup seasoning
• 1 spoon garlic powder
• 1 pack orange electrolyte drink
• 1 spoon mustard
• 2 spoons BBQ sauce
• 1 jalapeno, diced
• 12 turkey bites (bite-size turkey-sausage links sold in many commissaries in packs of 24)
• 4.23-ounce pack tuna
• ½ bag pork skins
• ½ pack ranch
• 2 spoons strawberry preserves
• ½ hot pot lid sunflower seeds

Pour 2 hot pot lids of water into a hot pot. Stir in the veggie soup seasoning, garlic powder, electrolyte pack, mustard, barbecue sauce and diced jalapenos. Bring to a boil. Add turkey and tuna. Bring to boil again while you crush the soup packet. Then add in the crushed soup, and stir for 2 minutes.

Unplug the hot pot and let sit for 5 minutes. Put pork skins in a bowl and pour noodles over them; lightly mix. Top with ranch, strawberry preserves and sunflower seeds.

DOUBLE LAYER M&M CHEESECAKE

• 1 pack vanilla cream cookies
• 2 hot pot lids hot cocoa powder
• 1 pack regular oatmeal
• 2 3-ounce packs cream cheese
• 1 standard bag peanut M&M’s
• 1 Chick-o-stick (comes in a 5.5-inch orange cylinder and is the consistency of peanut brittle with shaved coconut on the outside)

Separate the cream from the cookies and set aside. Crush the cookies to dust. Add 10 spoons of water and knead this together to make dough. Mold it in a bowl to form a pie crust. In a separate bowl, mix the cocoa powder, oatmeal and 3 spoons of water. After you mix this well, transfer it onto the crust, forming a second layer. In a bowl, mix together the cookie cream, cream cheese and milk. Pour that onto the pie. Place peanut M&M’s and crushed Chick-o-stick on top. Let it sit for 2 hours.

CHICKEN NOODLE MOLE

• 1 pack chicken chunks
• 2 chili soups
• 2 packs chili soup seasoning
• 2 spoons peanut butter
• 2 spoons Louisiana hot sauce
• 1 spoon barbecue sauce
• 1 spoon onion powder
• ½ hot pot lid kosher chili beans

Break apart the soup noodles and put them in a big empty bowl. Pour in more hot water than needed, and leave this to cook for 10 minutes. 

Meanwhile, make the mole: Put the chicken, with the water drained out, into an empty chip bag. Mix in the soup seasoning, peanut butter, hot sauce, barbecue sauce, onion powder, chili beans and 1 hot pot lid of hot water. Then place that bag in your empty hot pot and pour water around it, but not covering it, so the hot pot can heat the food. 

Drain the water from the noodles, and stir the mole into them. Enjoy!