Hello from quarantine! How are you feeling? I’m pretty fucking freaked out, especially given that I am hanging out by my lonesome in a city 1,500 miles from home and waiting with bated breath to find out what next moves a big-city mayor best known for his Sesame Street impression might make.
Anyway, enough about that, let’s talk about some freaking toasts: The one bit of connective tissue between this and every other crisis I’ve experienced, from nausea to natural disaster, is that I eat a lot of crunchy warmed up bread. In part, this is because I’m terrible at planning meals when I’m feeling anxious, and always seem to end up with an assortment of condiments and/or random foodstuffs but no other reasonable vehicle with which to transport them into my mouth.
A toast-with-some-stuff-on-it is also just the least taxing possible “meal” a person could make if they’re, say, realizing at 4 p.m. that they’re been staring wide-eyed into the gaping maw of the internet for several hours without moving or even breathing very much. So after extensive testing over a lifetime, and a lightning-round of toast-tasting over the last week, I’m here to give you the definitive ranking of toasts:
1. Pear and goat cheese on toast
2. Egg on toast
3. Brie and plum on toast
4. Smoked Salmon and cream cheese on toast
5. Sautéed mushrooms and balsamic vinegar on toast
6. Cucumber and cream cheese on toast