Just goes to show you ...

Remember when I was tooting my own horn about how much progress I'd made doing the 30-Day Shred? Hmmm. Yesterday? Not so much. I could only make it through one and a half circuits (of three) and I was done, done, done. Not sure why. I ate prior to working out; I usually don't do that. Will try, try again today, and I hope to knock it out of the park. So to speak.

The cornmeal tortillas turned out great! Here's the recipe. I found that rolling them between pieces of parchment paper worked better than waxed paper; other than that, I'll definitely make them again.

My original intention was to cut them into strips, sprinkle them with sea salt and bake them in the oven to garnish a taco salad. But I started looking around the World Wide Cookbook and found the easiest enchilada sauce recipe evah! so enchiladas suddenly turned up on the dinner menu. I had previously decided to use this taco seasoning recipe for the beef.

Making enchiladas is a labor-intensive process, and I've never done it before. There's a mess factor that would put some people off, including me, had I known just how much mess I was going to make. But the end result was definitely worth the time and trouble. Here's the recipe I used. I'm sure it would work better with commercially made tortillas; I had a little trouble getting them soft enough to fold and roll. But once they were in the baking dish, covered with sauce and – eventually – out of the oven, they were fine.

One of Michael Pollan's Food Rules is to "eat all the junk food you want as long as you make it." He uses the example of french fries. If we had to wash, peel cut, fry, salt, serve and clean up after ourselves when we want french fries, we wouldn't eat them very often. (And if you add homemade catsup to the plate, well … it takes a lot of tomatoes to make catsup!) When all we have to do is throw a dollar at a teen-ager through a drive-through fast-food window, it's pretty easy to eat them on a daily basis.

I would put enchiladas in the same category as french fries. They're certainly not health food, but work pretty well for a once-in-a-long-while delicious treat.

Moving right along, the much-ballyhooed health care summit kicks off at 10 a.m. Single-payer won't be debated (at least not inside Blair House; there will be demonstrations outside), so I don't expect the outcome to be the best solution for the citizens – or the economy – of the United States. But I'll watch it, because it is the hot-button issue of my life.

Aetna has one more day to get the check to me. If it doesn't arrive by tomorrow (the 10th business day), I'm to call the insurance commission counselor again. I really feel as if he's on my side; I'm sure he's helping hundreds of people every day, but I got the impression last time we talked that he really cared about what happened to me. That doesn't happen very often, especially from a bureaucrat.