Confessions of a Prison Cook: A Fusion of Food & Crime

Imagine being sentenced to ten years in jail. How would you survive? Confessions of a Prison Cook: A Fusion of Food & Crime is based on the true story of a New York banker's incarceration and redemption after becoming the inmates' chef.

Phil Longo is sent to Otisville federal prison in upstate New York for a decade. With just a strong Italian sense of food learned through family, he cons his way into what becomes a redemptive role as Kitchen Cook; drugging twin felons with nutmeg; stuffing stolen veggies down empty prosthetic legs. Drunks. Monks. Chinese gangsters and one-legged cooks. Food wasn't even the spiciest part of his experience. But it does act as an olive branch to "OtisVillains" like Joey, a handsome Mafia mademan who grooms his black hair with mayonnaise from the commissary; Jesus, chocolate-obsessed teen cousin to the Mexican cartel, or The Greek Brothers, obnoxious twins that live to stir the pot. Phil learns life is truly stranger than fiction. He gains rich insight into his fellow man and realizes: no one is rotten to the core.

The guards may have been the wildest diners, bar none: Greta, a bitter blowhard who longs to hose down the inmates; tiny French cook Louie, whose greasy food is a foil for his sleazy behavior; Teresa, a Muslim patrol guard whose raunchy split personality flavors the narrative; and Kitchen Cop, Noreen, or "Sip," whose sobriety is measured by the state of her beehive hairdo. Top it off with a pinch of insatiable and inept Nurse Blackie.

Short chapters center on coop calamities: SLING BLADE, where tuna can tops become cut-throat; RIN TIN TIN FOILED, where Phil's elderly mother smuggles homemade lasagna in- inside her girdle. Or MEAT AND GREET, where Phil fetches outside foods for famous Italian gangsters under the nose of Fury, the penitentiary's canine cop.

Original tongue-in-cheek recipes top off chapter's jarring insanity. Cook up Killing Two Birds with One Scone, Blackened Soul, Beat Bread, or Deep Throatisserie. Famous food & crime quotes, from The Sopranos to Shakespeare, flavor the narrative. Add a dash of historical culinary crimes, and wet your appetite for this piping hot, dark and saucy dramedy.