I rarely make toast. Bread has become my enemy in the battle for lower blood sugar levels. If I’m going to have a spike in blood sugars I want it to be from something I really, really enjoy. Yeah, Ice Cream comes to mind. And I don’t mean the 17 to 34 sugars kind of ice cream. Those super sweet ones have always made me a bit sick after eating them.
I quite enjoy a good no sugar added vanilla bean with 4 sugars. But I digress.
I love scrambled eggs with spinach, tomatoes, mushrooms, and topped with cheese once out of the skillet. Red pepper slices on the side and toast. This is the one meal where I like toast. I don’t need jelly, or butter, or anything, just toast, dry, plain, BUT NOT BURNT.
Cooking Toast Way Back Machine
I woke up in Mejirodai, Japan to the smell of burnt toast. Toast burnt so black you had to scrap down three layers to get to brown. Morning after morning, no alarm clock, just the thick air of burnt toast to bring you out of a sound sleep.
The reason I was told, “The slots in the toaster are too small and the bread sticks.” Hum, I wondered if there was a solution to this, especially since the bread was sliced by hand not pre-sliced. The knife wasn’t sharp enough to make thin slices, the skill level of the slicer wasn’t good enough to make thin slices, whatever the cause, it appeared the slices were not going to get any thinner so the only resolution I could think of was to find a toaster with wider slots.
This was late 1971 in Japan. There was a combination grocery/electronic appliances store. My hopes of finding a wide slot toaster were not high; but I did. There it was labelled as a toaster for bagels. No, I didn’t know they ate bagels in Japan in 1971 either. But . . .
With no language ability whatsoever I picked it up, took it to checkout and held out a bunch of money for the clerk to pick from. Graciously smiling, I left the store with the new toaster and the hope of waking the next morning to NOT the smell of burnt toast.
Harold, (the master of burnt toast) smiled and I think was confused by the gift. After all the old toaster still worked, why do we need a new one. Simply put I told him I was hoping now he didn’t have to scrap his toast each morning instead being able to make “scrap free toast”.
I anticipated the next morning, I shouldn’t have. Once again the smell of burnt toast filled the entire house. I went down stairs to find Harold smiling and scraping the toast. He really liked the fact he could make the slices thicker. He’d never liked the narrow slots in the old toaster and the new one allowed him to make his slices of bread even thicker than before.
He smiled as he merrily scrapped the new thick slices of Thermonuclear toast.
Great story!!