MARTINSVILLE – Darius “Trey” Eubanks serves up a big helping of compassion along with the food when he cooks.
Eubanks has been cooking lunches for the Salvation Army every Friday and Monday for the past year, as well as for its board meetings.
Helping out the folks who come to the Salvation Army “gave me another outlook” on life, he said.
He loves providing for those who need a hot meal, and he also appreciates being cared about by everyone there as well, he said.
“This working with Lt. George (Keith), the guidance, always making me feel welcome here,” Eubanks said. “The things he does for the Salvation Army really inspired me.”
Eubanks is no stranger to the kitchen. A year ago, he had his own place, called Trey’s Treats. However, his being from out of town – he’s from Siler City, North Carolina – kept people from accepting his business easily, he felt.
“If you’re not from Martinsville, they’ve got to kind of grow on you,” he said.
When he had his restaurant, he was surprised to find that “a lot of them who have a job wanted credit,” but wouldn’t come back to pay.
By contrast, at the Salvation Army, “I’d rather deal with the less fortunate” who truly appreciate a good meal, he said. “Since I’ve been cooking for free, I feel good for myself.”
When he cooks for the Salvation Army, “I try to do the basics of what I grew up in: baked chicken, spaghetti, fried chicken, rolls. All of it’s handmade. All of it’s scratch,” he said.
Recently, he was cooking a meal for the board of directors with a help of a woman everyone calls “Grandma.”
Eubanks prepared baked spaghetti while Grandma fried the chicken. As they cooked, they talked, moving easily back and forth from general chatter to cooking advice. As Grandma took chicken pieces out of the fryer, he’d take a break from assembling his spaghetti dish to put the chicken in a warming oven.
Eubanks and Grandma also talked about baking.
“Mayonnaise makes good biscuits,” Grandma said, “and cakes – light and fluffy.” With a regular pound cake recipe, she said, simply replace the eggs with 1 cup of mayonnaise. She also adds 2 tablespoons of sour cream. Both make the cake “really good, too. They make it moist.”
Eubanks also made salmon croquettes, the recipe for which he and Grandma mulled over. She likes them with some minced onion and green pepper in them, she said; but he left out the green pepper this time, so the flavor of the pepper wouldn’t clash with the flavors of the spaghetti dish.
When he first started cooking, he was preparing meals for 30, he said, but now it can get up to 100 at a time. He generally has a volunteer team to help him. However, he’s hoping someone else will come on board to learn the ropes so that he could have a day off now and then, “because Christmas is coming and vacation is here. … I’ve been here every Friday for a year,” and now he’d like the flexibility to go visit his family for the holidays, he said.
He has two daughters, LaShonda Richards and Arienne Richards, and seven grandchildren, he said.
Eubanks lives in Philpott, a nice contrast from his hometown, he said.
“I like it,” Eubanks said. “The air is so much different there, it’s great – totally different from the flat land of Siler City.”
Between his younger years in Siler City, which he still visits often, and being now in Martinsville, he worked in textiles in Greensboro, North Carolina, for 12 years. He ended up with “carpal tunnel in both hands real bad” and other work-related problems, he said.
Also in Greensboro, he worked in a restaurant, training under Chef Carlos Brown, a native of Charleston. Under Brown, Eubanks developed a love for Charleston-style food, with eggs and grits and gumbo at the top of his list of favorites, he said.
He also cooked in a Waffle House for five years, he added.
While he has cooked professionally, it is his upbringing which most molds his cooking style, he said.
“We just inherit where we come from – Siler City,” he said. “That’s what our family did: cooked for family reunions and holidays. I just love it. I get up every day, and if I can’t do anything else but cook, I’m fine.”
Eubanks always has supported the Salvation Army by dropping money in the kettles during the holiday season, he said, but volunteering on this level “is something I’ve never done” until the past year. “To run into this right here and to be able to help people is a blessing to me,” he said, “trying to help each other the best way we could.”
Some recipes from the Eubanks kitchen:
Baked spaghetti
1 recipe of choice of spaghetti with sauce
1 tub sour cream
2 cups shredded cheddar cheese
1 packet salami or pepperoni
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Put spaghetti with sauce into an oblong baking dish and spread smooth. Spread sour cream over it. Sprinkle cheese evenly over, then top with slices of pepperoni or salami.
Bake for 25 minutes if spaghetti was hot when casserole was assembled, or 40 minutes if it needed to be reheated.
Salmon Croquettes
2 (15 oz.) cans salmon
2 eggs
Handful of flour
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. pepper
1 medium onion, minced, optional
½ green pepper, minced, optional
Mix all ingredients. Form into patties. Let cook on a grill for a few minutes, then put them in a pan with oil and fry until cooked through.
Fried Chicken
1 chicken
Salted water
Buttermilk
Seasoned flour
All-purpose flour
Cooking oil in fryer
Cut chicken into pieces (breasts, thighs, legs). Let pieces soak in salted water for three hours.
Rinse chicken pieces and put into a bowl. Pour in enough buttermilk to cover the pieces and refrigerate overnight.
When ready to cook, cut into each piece of chicken a few times. Roll pieces in a mixture of the two flours. Once cooking oil is hot, drop pieces into oil and cook until the internal temperature, as measured by a thermometer, reaches 165 degrees.
Collards
2 bunches collard greens
½ onion
1 packet Southern-style Seasoning Mix for greens
1 or 2 cubes Knorr chicken bouillon
Chop collards (discarding the ribs) and onion. Put to boil with seasoning mix and bouillon cubes. Let simmer for 45 to 60 minutes, until tender.
Potato Salad
10 medium potatoes
5 hard-boiled eggs
1 ½ cups Duke’s mayonnaise
8 oz. pickle relish
½ cup mustard
2 tsp. sugar
Chop potatoes into uniform sizes, then boil until they can be pierced with a fork. Do not cook so long that they get mushy. Chop potatoes into bite-sized pieces.
Chop eggs.
Stir all ingredients together.
Grandma’s Lazy Man Peach Cobbler
1 stick butter, melted
1 cup flour
1 cup milk
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 TBS vanilla
1 tsp. lemon extract
1 tsp. apple pie spice mix
2 large cans sliced peaches
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Melt butter into a long, rectangular casserole dish. Remove from oven when melted.
Beat flour, milk, sugar, egg, vanilla, lemon extract and spice mix. Pour into the pan gently and evenly over the butter (do not stir). Gently pour peaches (juice included) over the batter. Place in the oven and bake for 45 minutes to one hour. After it has browned on top, stick a knife in the middle. If dough comes out stuck to the knife, let the cobbler remain for 10 more minutes. If not, it’s ready.
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