Sure, I spread crunchy peanut butter and preserves on my toast. Granted, it’s that all natural peanut butter where the oil separates and you have to vigorously mix it back in before it freaks you out, but I have never known anything different from that peanut butter. The toast is one of those nutritious sprouted wheat kinds, which I actually don’t mind so long as the topping is hearty enough to mask the healthy taste of the bread. There’s some ring of truth in the stereotypical granola California.
When I’m really late for school, I toss a couple of slices of sharp cheddar onto a piece of toast and let it melt away before I stuff it in my mouth. It’s a lazy man’s open faced grilled cheese, but it’s sure tasty at seven in the morning on a Monday. It’s so prominent in my household that we even gave it a name: Cheesy Toast. If I have an extra two minutes, I might get fancy and place a smear of whole grain Dijon mustard under the cheese for a bit of zing.
If I have normal bread that tastes white and delicious, I usually spread on butter and preserves or marmalade. The purity of the bread heightened by the accompanying spreads cannot be achieved by wholesome brown bread.
Eggs in a nest can also start my slow, procrastination-filled mornings. It’s not really on toast, but it’s in toast (which I think still counts). You cut out a hole in the center of the slice of bread, and plop an egg into it, all while cooking it in a copious amount of butter. A smear of jam and a fork complete a happy Heather. I eat through the egg quickly before drowning myself in the butter-crisped bread, which tastes so much better than plain, toasted bread.
On other days, I get a bit more… exotic, shall we say. These combos are for those who 1) don’t care what their breath smells like in the morning (this is me; I bet a lot of my first period classmates hate sitting next to me), or 2) have some really powerful mints in their car.
During a phase of my obsession with kimchi quesadillas, I started eating a small bowl of kimchi with my Cheesy Toast. I used to lay the kimchi on top of the gooey cheese, but the kimchi would fall off and it’d be a mess. The richness of the cheddar cuts through the funky sour notes of the kimchi. I bet it’d be good hangover food (though luckily I have never had the chance to test it out).
If there’s hummus in the refrigerator, I might smear that onto a slice of toasted bread. The bread warms the cold hummus just enough to take the chill off, but not so much that the hummus is weirdly warm (like warm orange juice; it’s nasty). The garlicky creaminess of the chickpea spread soothes my morning person, and probably wakes up my peers in the process.
I love the versatility of toast. One can do anything with it and still be utterly content with the results. It’s been indispensable in my life, and I can’t imagine my mornings without the familiar slices.
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