Toast

Toast is new in my kitchen. For years we didn't eat much toast, so we didn't devote valuable counter space to a toaster. Lately, we've been eating more toast, so we have acquired a toaster, which is occupying a space on the high counter where we eat breakfast. The toaster was a gift from Evelyn, who took us to Target and helped us pick it out during our visit with her last weekend.















I enjoy toast with butter, with peanut butter, or with peanut butter and pepper jam. I like it with cheese. I like lots of other kinds of jam. I haven't toasted a bagel yet, but my new toaster has wide slots in order to accommodate bagel halves, and a button that reads "Bagel." I'm still experimenting with the little slider that determines how dark to toast the bread. I wonder how long it will take until I tire of toast!

Toast on google images. So simple!

Toasters have retained their simplicity and they still just consist of the slots with electric coils, the pop-up mechanism, and the darkness selector -- no "feature creep" that dreaded phenomenon that more often happens in computer programs. My new toaster is pretty much like the even-simpler electric device invented in 1893, with the pop-up feature developed in 1919: history here.

The toaster oven, I would say, is a toaster with feature creep. If I want the cheese toasted on top of the bread, or if I want a tuna melt, or if I want to toast a huge sandwich bun, that's a job for my big, beautiful Breville toaster oven. It also reheats pizza or other leftovers nicely, and can bake a two-person casserole or a small tray of cookies. Theoretically, it could broil small items, but I don't want to make a mess in it (my big oven is self-cleaning).

Though a great device, the toaster oven is simply too slow for the basic job: toasting. The toaster takes around 2 minutes to toast 2 slices of white bread. My toaster oven takes 5 or 6 minutes, and although it does more slices at a time, the wait until you can start spreading your peanut butter is something like two times longer. As every user of Microsoft products knows, when designers add a lot of functionality to something simple, it gets less convenient to do what you originally liked it for.

That's all that's really new in my kitchen at the end of September, unless you count the new brand of pepper jam that I bought recently. Or the new jar of Durkee's Famous Sauce that we now have on hand after a long absence -- but I'll write about the Durkee's later.

I'm sharing this post with a group of bloggers who post about numerous new things in their kitchens each month. I feel rather un-adventurous compared to them, since I rarely try really new items from the store, although I try new flavor combinations and new recipes sometimes. To see their much broader selection of new things, check the master list of links at Sherry's blog here: Sherry's Pickings: In My Kitchen. What's new in your kitchen?