So if your wife is ever cooking the fish and you're supposed to be making the potatoes and you get them all boiled and mashed and it comes time to add the milk and you find that you finished it for breakfast in the morning and you forgot to stop for more on your way home, that raspberry yogurt you've got in the back of the fridge will work pretty well.

You can hardly tell.

So there's a Spanish-language soap opera playing on the television and there's an enormous portrait of Christ above it and I'm standing at the counter in a by-God authentic Mexican restaurant. I've had it with that sissified, Americanized Taco Bell crap, and I'm out looking for some by-God authentic Mexican food.

The board behind the cashier lists the menu twice -- once in Spanish, once in English -- in long columns under "Burrito" and "Enchilada" and "Taco" headings, and I wonder how much of my high-school Spanish I remember.

Asada says one side of the board. Broiled Beef. I knew that. Pollo is Chicken. Carnitas, Pork. Pescado, Fish.

Al Pastor means "Shepherd Style." Didn't know that.

Cabeza? Isn't that "head"? That can't be right. I scan to the other side and sure enough: Beef Head.

Lengua, the next line says. Lengua? I look over at the translation. Ah, of course. Tongue. Silly me.

Sesos is next. Brains.

And last, at the bottom: Buche. All by itself. I check, but there's no translation on the English side of the board.

And, really, that's just fine.