Once again today, at the dojo, and at the Peruvian chicken joint where I opted for the cheapest item on the menu—which my son’s friend understood as some ancient form of self-sacrifice echoing down through the ages from some unthinkably stark pit of want—I was met with astonishment when admitting to the infamous $15 a week grocery bill.

$15 was my starting food budget when I moved into this elevated man cave—some might say returned whence my arboreal ancestors came. That money was not required. As soon as my sister, the women at work, the mothers at the karate school—and the lonely lady up the street—discovered that some literate and unattached human male was living such a Spartan existence I was swamped with more food than could fit into this tiny refrigerator. Soon my greatest problem was keeping the empty microwavable containers organized by woman. Gone were my austere dreams of rediscovering the six-pack protected by my flesh keg. Hell, the mother of one of my fighters drove by the house with the intention of winging a chicken sub up on the porch like a paper delivery driver.

Even when one tries to starve in this food-saturated world avoiding the avalanche of food is impossible. Now my estate manager has acquired a woman who likes to cook in large quantities and is ever bringing the tasty bowl of this or that to my austere door.

As it stands I spend $15 per week on groceries, most of which I consume on my coffee break and lunch break at work, only carting home about $5 worth of food per week.

I budget $20 a week on dining out. With a single folding metal chair and a 10 by 14 inch tray table, I am not exactly set up for entertaining. I also spend about $20 a month on drinking out, which essentially means that renting a room for $400 costs me an additional $100 per month to socialize away from it.

So really, when speaking of my active grocery budget, we are looking at one bag of groceries that have cost about $5: beans, peas, noodles, shredded wheat, deli-cheese-ends, etc. This haul nets me three ‘writer-made’ meals per week, and various celebratory dishes enjoyed with 2 cheap beers in the wake of a just finished book—the twice monthly not-even-close-to-starving-author’s triumph.

The Ghetto Gourmet will be devoted to such delicacies. I was going to describe the meal that shall not be eaten because I have gotten accidentally drunk [back to that later]. Instead I shall promote the Irish writer’s favorite past time, with a Harm City twist.

My liquor of choice is rum—as I fancied myself a pirate as a boy, until I discovered I’d have to be a homo. My Rum of choice is—was—Myers. I have bracketed down from Barbados rum, to Jamaican rum, and finally to Puerto Rican rum, and have settled for Castile, which can be gotten in a glass bottle—very important—for 6.99 for 7.50 ml at the fine liquor emporium out in Harm County where my son purchases his Mount Gay rum for $30.

That was a good deal, the single bottle being used medicinally to relieve cramps twice, thrice to help me get to sleep for my 3 hour nap before work, and finally fueling a sorry little excuse for a party.

Not a bad deal. Rather than pick up the weekly six pack of $4.59 beer and hazard those bubbles before bed, I decided to head down to John’s Korean liquor store for a bottle of Castile—and it was $18! It was Wednesday and I had but $15 to my name. Then I saw it there, on the bottom shelf:

Imported and bottled by Majestic Distilling Co., Inc., Baltimore, Maryland

This stuff has the aroma of paint thinner and tastes like the plastic bottle. No, it tastes much worse than plastic. The ship with the wind in its sails behind West Indies Rum does offer hope of –I suppose the same kind of roaring hangover enjoyed by actual pirates.

All is not lost. The taste can be improved to the point where you should be able to drink a shot straight without one of your eyes dropping out.

1. Transfer the contents of the nasty plastic bottle into a glass bottle. I prefer Everfresh glass pint and long neck 24 ounce bottles, which I use for bottling and chilling tap water.

2. Insert 1-3 slices of crystalized ginger and shake vigorously.

3. Place in the refrigerator and you will have something almost as smooth as the worst Puerto Rican Rum.

4. Mark the bottle! In this way you might avoid accidentally downing 4 shots in one gulp thinking that the clear liquid is water. I was supposed to be writing about something else just now but it has slipped my mind.

Enjoy, and do not eat the ginger once it has soaked in the rum. I warned you.