Toast

Who thought you could forget how to make toast? Well, I came back from Changsha this weekend and proved that you can. I spent the last few days of a relatively uneventful National Day holiday last week with my friend Zhao XiaTing in Changsha celebrating the Mid-autumn Moon Festival. While the moon watching was foiled by a dastardly and untimely two days of clouds, we did manage to get out to the Metro store that had eluded me all of last year. Metro is a sort of German Costco that has branches in some of the bigger Chinese cities and is the place to go for luxury foreign goods. My shopping bag included such decadences as three loaves of bread, pasta sauce, boneless chicken breasts, butter and microwave popcorn for Colin among a few other things. Foremost among the reasons for going was getting the proper ingredients to take advantage of the toaster-oven left to me by my friends John and Erin when they left to go back to America at the end of last term. I returned home to Liuyang brimming with excitement about the large number of pieces of toast I was planning on eating. I popped my first piece of bread in and sat down to watch it. Unfortunately the toaster was set to 'slow-roast' and didn't do much of anything for a while. I gathered my wits and tried again, this time managing to 'broil' the top of the toast and leave the bottom untoasted. My third attempt came to a rather flaming end as I put the toast below the rack and far to close to the heating element. At this point, I'm a little nervous because it's really hard for me to go get more bread and I'd gone through three pieces without success. I popped in prospective toast number four certain that I had set everything correctly. I sat and watched to toast through the window to make sure nothing would go wrong and while water may not boil if you watch it, toast still toasts and a few moments later I pulled the perfectly golden brown toast out of the oven, slathered it in butter and reveled in one of those 'little things'.