Hello Friends of DISH! We are so grateful for your investment in our tenants access to healthy food.

We sat down with long time tenant and member of our Community Advisory Board, Lexx, to talk about how he makes cooking in an SRO work, from prep to breaking bread. With this campaign we are creating more opportunities for our tenants to nourish themselves and build community.

DISH : What’s your favorite dish to cook?

LEXX : I love to cook Sinigang. Sinigang is a Filipino soup dish, there are a lot of vegetables. It ranges from onions, tomatoes, eggplant, Filipino long bean, Dikon radish, lots of leafy vegetables like spinach and bok choy and okra. The prep is normally 45-60 minutes. It’s so tedious in cleaning it, rinsing the leaves out, slicing, quartering the tomatoes and the onions, cutting the beans in two inches, slicing the okra in diagonal, with the eggplant, the radish. When that’s all done, it goes into the pot, and it has to be put into a specific order, that way, it doesn’t get too soggy when it’s time to eat it. It has to have some sustenance. Usually when I’m done with it, I’m tired, but I get to enjoy what I made.

Sinigang is always good. Always good.

DISH : How do you make it work in an SRO where there’s one community kitchen to share?

LEXX : Well what I do since I live on the second floor and the kitchen is on the first floor, I have to already know exactly what my utensils are gonna be, my cooking tools, my pots and pans, I have to have my seasonings, and then my ingredients themselves. Usually, depending on what I’m cooking, it can be a tedious process. And then clean up also.

The other thing too, I’m lucky to have a tall refrigerator, that I can actually put the pot in to. I wouldn’t have been able to do that if my refrigerator had only been a square size.

DISH : What do you enjoy most about cooking?

LEXX : When I cook, I always try to share a portion. What I’ve learned is in situations when we cook for ourselves, especially when love is involved, we give a portion out to our neighbor.

I think it’s a cultural thing. I used to give portions to people to see what they thought about my cooking, but it’s not about that anymore! Whether they like it or not, it’s the fact that I make an effort to invite them over. There’s power in breaking bread, there’s power in sharing food, there’s power in giving. Truly giving and serving.

For a lot of the community residents that attend and live here, that makes all the difference in the world, to be able to have a breaking of bread, to share that meal in a community setting.