A Holiday Treat

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Tucking into muesli and strawberry yoghurt one morning during the half term break, I am startled by the strength and depth of the flavour.  I do  a double-take and inspect the bowl as if I might find a hidden mystery ingredient that’s making it taste so good.  My search is fruitless, (or as fruitless as Marks and Spencer 48% Fruit Muesli allows), and I surrender, sitting back to savour this unexpected pleasure.  I let the mixture roll voluptuously across my palate like a wine taster, seeking the right vocabulary to describe the complex sensation.

Why does my breakfast taste so different today?  It’s much the same breakfast that I have every day of the week, though the type of yoghurt may vary slightly, depending on what’s currently on special offer at the supermarket – or whether I’ve misread the label.  Cherry, blueberry, strawberry, rhubarb – hurrah; forest fruits – bother, I thought it was blueberry, but still it will do.

How can this familiar taste suddenly strike me as exotic?  I gaze across the table and out of the caravan window for a clue – and this gesture is in itself a clue.  Usually, I’m not facing a window at breakfast.  Nor am I sitting at a table.  First gulp of the yoghurt is grabbed as I pass by the kitchen counter, a chaser to the handful of tablets I take on waking (thyroxine for an underactive thyroid, sulfasalazine for rheumatoid arthritis).  Before the next spoonful, I whisk upstairs to give a ten-minute warning to my sleeping husband and daughter; the next is grabbed on the way to the utility room to iron the latter’s school uniform.  My morning yoghurt may or may not be mixed with muesli, depending on hungry I’ve been on waking.

I thrust a few coins into my daughter’s purse to pay for her toast at morning break, then grab another spoon of yoghurt on the way to pack her schoolbag.  (Better not mix those two actions up.)

Occasionally as I dash about on my early morning auto-pilot course, I recall my lovely, late friend Eileen’s insistence that there are no calories in anything you eat standing up.  If there’s some raisin bread in the breadbin, I’ll add a slice of fruit toast and butter, confident that it will pass my waistline bywithout sticking.

On workdays, my mind is far too full of early morning routine tasks to spare a thought for the enjoyment of my breakfast.  Now, on holiday, with time and energy to spare, I wonder what other pleasures my usual morning rush makes me miss.  And vow, when I go back to work next week, to take the time each day to smell the muesli.

Let them eat toast!

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I don’t know why I am so averse to buying toasters.  But the fact is that for a number of years I’ve been eking out other people’s cast-offs, rather than invest in a new one.   As my mother progressed to a four-slice machine, we stuck with her old two-slicer.  Sprinting up and down the kitchen to reload the thing every few minutes whenever the three of us were having a toast-themed breakfast, I must have burned off enough calories to cancel out my consumption of at least the crusts.

It was not my fault that the toaster lives so far from the kettle – blame the electrician who sited the sockets in my cottage so eccentrically.  But it dawned on me eventually that promotion to a four-slice toaster would save me an awful lot of time and trouble.

I therefore declared the demise of my old white two-slice toaster and  decided to splash out (not literally – although that certainly have hastened its end).

I thought choosing its successor would be a simple task.  Surely there can only be so many variations on a theme, even in the ever-growing Argos catalogue?  But no.  There was page after page of the toaster and its cousins, with mind-boggling, unheard-of (by me) features now apparently all the rage.  A toaster that changes colour at the same speed as the bread? A little annexe in which one can simultaneously boil an egg?  Bun-warming attachment, anyone?  This decision was going to take longer than I thought.

Eventually I settled for a shiny new aluminium one which offered all sorts of extras that I didn’t know until now that I’d needed.  The bagel feature, for example, handily toasts just one side of the slice – ideal for muffins and teacakes.  The optional “reheat” button is brilliant on a school day, when my complicated early morning choreography means I’m never in the kitchen when the toast pops up. The subsequent quick blast is just enough to ensure effective butter-melting – the hallmark of a perfect slice of toast.

Before my purchase, toast in my household had become a snack of last resort, I so hated using my naff old two-slicer.  But now my microwave hardly ever gets a look-in.  When the cupboard is bare, its my multi-tasking toaster that comes to the rescue.  Hungry, are they?  Then let them eat toast!

Post-script: I still retain a strong allegiance to another small electric kitchen device eloquently referred to recently by a Malapropian relative as “The George Formby Grill”.  Now there’s a gadget to conjure with – hot food and ukelele tunes at a single stroke.  What’s not to like?