Monday goes back to the grind.

Let's see, where to start? Usually it's breakfast. Today it takes a little bit of lawyering and etymology to really see what's going on here.

I had a slice of banana bread with margarine as "before-bike-snack." Now, technically I have here "broken my fast" of some 8+ hours, but I haven't had any substantial kind of nourishment yet, and would eat a more substantial "breakfast" in about 30 minutes, so was this my breakfast? I think that this maybe falls into the hobbit hierarchy of meals somewhere, but I'm not so well versed in the difference between first and second breakfast. Perhaps my readership can enlighten me as to the subtleties involved.

After riding to work I had a banana waffle sandwich with peanut butter, margarine and syrup. I made sure to really put the waffles through the figurative wringer. Here the figurative wringer is a litteral toaster, but "through the toaster" is not such a compelling idiom. I wrung the waffles through my toaster twice at a high setting and the pale side actually started to brown a little.

One good thing about this resiliency to burning is that you never really get that desicated, empty feeling that you might get with other frozen waffles when you toast them so much that even the membrane between the ridges begins to brown. Some people might like their waffles like this. Some people also like flacid bacon. You will not find me anywhere near that venn diagram.

Then I had my coffee, of course. It was the Flavia French roast with two French vanilla Coffeemate creamers, nothing special, nothing terrible I haven't already bemoaned in previous entries.

Lunch was a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli. I couldn't resist the temptation of just throwing it in my bag and not take the time to make myself lunch before leaving for work in the morning. I did bother to spread margarine on two pieces of wheat bread. If you were unaware, this is the official side item of Chef Boyardee's asssorted fare. Failure to comply with these regulations may warrant UN sanctions depending on the degree and necessity of deviance.

Over the course of the afternoon I started eating a tootsie pop. This was due largely to the fact that I was given a tootsie pop by one of the professors here. I'm not a big fan of candy, and tootsie pops are pretty near the bottom of my "comprehensive ranking of world candy according to my own personal preference." I didn't want to be impolite, though, so I took it and thanked him for it. Later, because I had it, I decided to give tootsie pops another shot. It was red raspberry and the candy itself was pretty good. By the end of work I hadn't even gotten to the point where the candy shell wears thin and you can start to taste the chocolate fudgewax inside. I thought it might prove dangerous to ride my bike and eat a lollipop at the same time, and I had pushed my sugar tollerance well beyond it's usual bounds, so I wrapped it back up and set it neatly on my desk in case I wanted it later, which I still don't.

When I got home I had a celery stick with peanut butter for first dinner, and then bean burritos for second dinner with crispy tortilla and salsa as a transitional course.

I have a bit of an addiction to Taco Bell bean burritos. When finances allow, I often have them add sour cream, nacho cheese and/or guacamole. There is something so appealing about all of that goey satisfaction barely reined in by a tortilla that is quickly becoming less sturdy as it soaks up goo from the inside. It's quite possibly one of the most perfect swill delivery systems known to man. If only they still had the chilitos and I could add a squirt of that chilimeat paste, a slice of bacon, and maybe a squirt of the baja sauce to the mix...

But Taco Bell won't cater to my dreams like I would like, and so I must take matters into my own hands. Buying a can of Taco Bell brand refried beans costs about the same than a bean burrito, and usually ends up making about 5-6 burritos for me. The one thing I cannot buy nor find or make a comparable substitute for is their red sauce. I can make lots of other sauces that might test better to most audiences, but it's just not quite the same. I can buy crapy yellow cheese. I can get all kinds of onions. I just cannot get their red sauce.

I compensate by making the beans themselves more interesting. Yesterday I started with a Tbsp. each of olive oil and butter in a frying pan on low heat. Then I added about 3 cloves of garlic and let it cook until it started to soften. Then I added diced onion(1/2 a small one), green pepper (1/3 a big one), red pepper(1/3 a medium one) and jalapeno (1/2 a pretty average one). I let the juices release a little bit into the oil, then I added the can of refried beans, a dash of bourbon and a few Tbsp of water.

The water just helps you actually stir the refried beans, but you don't want to over-do it or you'll lose some of the complexity of the vegetables when you have to cook down the water before it's a good thickness for serving. It doesn't take much bourbon, maybe a teaspoon. Sometimes I use tequila. It just adds a nice warm edge to the beans. If I had a kitschy restaurant, these would probably be called "Borracho Bean Burritos," although they don't really have enough booze to get you drunk. I had three burritos and a Yeungling and put the rest of the beans away in a filing cabinet, I mean my refridgerator.

The burritos were topped off with a little of the TJ's Spring greens mix, which just had to be used up ASAP before it all turned to swamp slime, some diced tomatoes, a dash or three of McIlhenny's chipotle tabasco sauce and a mix of munster and longhorn cheeses. Letting the garlic and the jalapenos cook in the oil before adding the beans really lets their flavors permeate the whole thing with a very sturdy broad palate to which the onions and peppers lend a bright sweetness. If only I'd had some sour cream on hand, they would have been just about perfect, save for the guacamole, bacon, nacho cheese and chilito measte (meat+paste, Ed.) , of course.

Later, for desert I had a Little Debbie's Nutty Bar. Actually, I had two bars, since they come in a twin pack, and who eats just one of those things anyway? They're so light and crispy, there's really not much to them anyway. More than adding calories to my evening, what they did accomplish is instilling in me a desire to drink a tall, cold glass of milk.

For as much as I cook with (and occaisionally chug) heavy cream, I almost never drink milk. I used to have problems with dairy products. I couldn't live without cheese, but cheeses never bothered me the way straight milk does. Even when I don't get stomach cramps, my body just makes so much mucus that the metabolic aftermath is a sufficient deterent to dunking cookies or eating much cold cereal for breakfast. This thirst for milk has not abated yet though, and it appears as if more drastic action is necessary.

Maybe I'm turning into a were-cow. I do enjoy salads a lot more than I used to...