Adventures With Toast (or: Welcome to Your New Flat)

I experience life through food. That’s just how I function. Because of this, one of the first moments that I really realized I was in a different country was when I was faced with the food selection in my local grocery store. This was on Sunday afternoon, and although I’d been in the country since Wednesday, it hadn’t really seemed real. It was the butter and cheese that had done it. There was so much available that it was sorted by what part of the country it was from. Welcome to Scotland, the land of milk and – well, milk.

Back in my flat, I transferred all of my purchases to the relevant storage location. At this point, I was faced with something else different: the kitchen. An inventory of appliances is as follows: a refrigerator, a microwave, and an electric stove/oven unit with two tiny ovens. That’s it. Oh, except for the hot water pot. Understandably then, I was faced with a bit of a dilemma when I wanted some toast with my cup of tea. There isn’t a toaster.

Fortunately, one of my flatmates was able to enlighten me on the toast making process. I of course completely ignored her directions and muddled it out on my own. Because of this, I now know both what to do and what not to do.

To make toast:

1. Turn on the top oven to gas 4. Do not, under any circumstances, turn it up to 5 or 6, even if you’re in a hurry. 
2. Place no more than two slices of bread on the toast rack. While it looks like more would fit, this is in fact not the case. 
3. Slide the toast rack into the top rack of the oven. Make sure bread is not touching the heating element. 
4. Watch toast carefully. When bread appears, well, toasty, flip to toast the other side. If you don’t watch the toast carefully, it will burn. 
5. When finished, remove the toast from the oven, turn off, and eat the toast.

Very straight forward, right? However, if you’re like me, you completely ignored the warnings in either step 1 or step 4. And because you ignored these warnings, your toast burned. So, here are some trouble shooting steps.

To salvage toast (complete these steps as quickly as humanly possible):

1. Quickly pull toast out of the oven. 
2. Open the window, because the fire alarm going off is really not optimal.
3. Turn the oven off.  
4. Place toast on plate, and cover with topping of your choice. Opaque toppings such as peanut butter or nutella are ideal, as these camouflage the burnt bits.
5. Sit at the table and act as normal as possible. That way, when your flatmates poke their heads into the kitchen asking if you burned something, you can shake your head and act mystified. “No, not that I know of. But I did make some toast.”

Commence camouflage procedure

Originally written for the Scripps College Off-Campus Study blog