The Doubtful Salad, and other stories

Chest/Back day, second only to shoulder day imo. Sadly, we got a late start so I had to work out at home, followed of course by the usual fruit/protein shake ...
I've decided that a rushed, sub-par home workout, even breaking 1 workout into 2, is better than taking an extra rest day. This way my metabolism at least gets a boost while I'm sitting on my ass at work all day, not to mention the help with stress reduction.

Speaking of stress, it's quarter close - any finance or accounting people out there know what that means: long hours and scrambling to get 500 things at once done by yesterday.

Tied to my desk today, I had to bite the bullet and finally go downstairs to the company cafeteria to get food. Fortunately, the salad special today was a black beans and tomato concoction that a sign advised me to "smother with cheddar cheese and imagine that I'm on a southwestern getaway" or something to that effect.

I compromised with some black olives, but built a massive spinach salad on the side instead of the cheese, and anyway a southwestern getaway would be uncomfortable this time of year - Virginia is humid enough right now. I even took a picture of the salad with my cell phone:

I forgot how the average mass-market dressing takes like a gelatinous, chemical-laden goo. Oh well.

I made veggie fajitas and black bean soft tacos for dinner with the random stuff below: onions, squashes, bell pepper, rainbow chard, and kale. The strawberries were for eating while I cooked; I missed my afternoon fruit b/c I was unwilling to spend 99 cents on one of the decrepit bananas available for purchase.

I mashed up the tofu in a pan w/ a potato masher, added a can of black beans and some cumin and garlic powder. Just black beans would work, too, or even just the veggies, but that would be too small to satisfy Derek's man-sized hunger.

Meanwhile I steamed the 1/2 lb of greens and sauteed the veggies with pepper and a dash of salt. I add just a bit of salt when sauteing to draw the water out of the vegetables so they stay crisp.

Trader Joe's makes whole-wheat tortillas with just 50 calories a piece; how do they do it? Anyway, that's a good thing; those giant white flour tortillas they use at places like Chipotle have about 350 empty calories.

We had a big salad too, of course.