Monday, you magots. Move!

It was Monday. Weren’t you all excited to go back to work after a drab weekend? I sure was. I was eager to hop on my bike and knock out 5 miles in the drizzle before I even ate breakfast. When I ride, my tummy gets upset if I've eaten too recently, so that means I had to wait till I got to work to eat breakfast.

It was a humble breakfast, the last of the Trader Joe's Blueberry waffles with some margarine and honey made into a sandwich and rice that had been in the rice cooker all night and so was very soft and puffy with some butter, cinnamon and a little kiss of honey.

Thankfully, neither the sandwich nor the rice exploded as I rode to work. The rice was actually much better as it got cold. I found myself really enjoying the texture as the butter started to reset and the whole thing started to get more jiggly than squishy.

Both the breakfast items were small, though, and lunch was late in the day, so I ate half a KitKat bar around noon and saved the other half for desert after lunch.

Lunch was kind of depressing today. It was some Easter ham with this carrot and stuffing stuff my parents had made as a side for our big family Easter dinner. It was all very good on Easter, and even yesterday wasn't terrible, but the texture of the stuffing had definitely suffered and when I microwaved the dish enough for the stuffing to come back to life, the ham was a little overdone.

I also still had that spaghetti with the olive oil from last Friday. I took a bite and it still seemed good, but I figured the stuffing and ham would be enough, so that's still on the menu for today.

I get a lot of grief from my roommate for keeping food in the fridge too long, but at home growing up we seemed to keep leftovers for a long time. I guess my parent's kitchen is a little more aseptic than mine now.

After lunch I went and made a cup of Flavia's English breakfast tea on the fourth floor with a shot of CoffeeMate original creamer. I was walking back to my office when the smell of the tea just hit me and I stopped in my tracks and had a very strong flashback.

I was on my hands and knees crawling through underbrush on a wet spring afternoon in the hills of West Virginia foraging for mushrooms. There's such a taboo against eating wild mushrooms, but I've found a little education goes a long way. There are a lot of delightful things to eat in the woods, especially in Pennsylvania and West Virginia in the spring and fall, and there's something very satisfying about finding them in the wild as opposed to on a shelf in WholeFoods.

I'm not sure why the tea caused the flashback to that moment, when tea was not involved at all, but it if you've ever had Flavia products you know that there is a lot of chemical juggling involved in taking what might start out as tea or coffee and processing it for storage in a little foil pouch and then "brewed" back to life in about 5 seconds.
I don't want to knock Flavia or the corporations who use them to dispense free coffee to myself and other employees, temporary and full-time. I have drank more than my fair share some days just trying to get through some mind-numbing drudgery after barely sleeping after being out all night in Brooklyn at some comedy event or other. The fact remains though that my cup of English breakfast "tea" was sending off a very loamy vapor.

Then there was dinner. This could have been a swillsday special too. Hot dogs cooked in a can of pork and beans and some oven fries on the side.
Pork and beans out of a can was one of the first things I ever started actively cooking instead of just reheating. In high school and college I used to try to add things to the sauce to chef up something more than the ketchup water that usually fills the gaps between the beans. Some ideas were better than others, but these days I stick to a little more ketchup, some mustard, preferably a nice brown, and about a tablespoon of brown sugar.

I thought my recent diet could use a little more vegetables, though, so I added a jalapeno, half a vidalia onion and a tablespoon of crushed garlic (lots of vitamin C in there, you know) and let that cook on a low heat till the onions started to clarify before adding the beans, ketchup, mustard, brown sugar and hot dogs.

Of course, the only way to eat a hot dog cooked in pork and beans is on a folded slice of white bread. sometimes i'm fancy and fold one corner to the other creating a very dynamic triangle-bun shape, but today it was the simple top to bottom fold. Symmetry is very important to mess control as well as presentation.

And wouldn't you know it, I had about 3 glasses of flat ginger ale. It grows on you. Try it.

Come back tomorrow for some exciting developments in breakfast!