Toasts, Ranked

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

7. Sautéed spinach and garlic on toast

8. Cheddar and apples on toast

9. Gravy on toast (Shit on a shingle)

10. Avocado and tomato on toast

11. Peanut butter and honey on toast

12. Avocado on toast

13. Aged meats and cheese on toast

14. Salad dressing (creamy) on toast

15. Honey and hot sauce on toast

16. Peanut butter and bananas on toast

17. Mustard (old-fashioned, grainy) on toast

18. Olive oil and a tiny bit of raw garlic on toast

19. Apples and honey on toast

20. Honey butter on toast

21. Almond butter on toast

22. Honey on toast

23. Peanut butter on toast

24. Apples and peanut butter on toast

25. Salad dressing (not creamy) on toast

26. Butter on toast

27. Aged meats on toast

28. Olive oil on toast

29. Jam and butter on toast

30. Maple syrup and butter on toast

31. Fluff on toast

32. Salsa on toast

33. Non-aged sandwich meats on toast

34. Olives on toast

35. Mustard (yellow) on toast

36. Jam on toast