Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Breakfast from 0 to 60 in 5.8 Seconds Flat

My breakfast has that nice “new car” smell to it.

Our old toaster oven has been slowly dying over the last few weeks. Not that this should have been a surprise, since we got it in our Pre-Kids incarnations and have used it pretty much every day ever since.  It owes us nothing. 

The last straw was when the right side of the heating element went dark, so we ended up with meals where the left was well prepared but the right was mushy, formless and distasteful, much like American politics these days. That’s fine in Washington DC but it doesn’t make for good bagels.

So we went out and got a new toaster oven.

It’s snazzy. It’s sleek. It has multiple knobs, each of which has to be set to exactly the proper place before toasting can occur. And it has a feature where the toast rack pulls out a bit when you open the door, so you don’t have to reach all the way in to get your breakfast, toasting your knuckles in the process. I like this feature. It is, in fact, the one thing I insisted on when we started out toaster oven search. I’m a happy bagel-toaster these days.

Except that the whole thing smells like my local Chevy-Pontiac-Olds-Ford-Saturn-Chrysler-Dodge-Hummer-DeLorean-Tucker-REO-Nash-Lockheed-Martin dealership showroom whenever you make anything, a quality that gets imparted into my bagels and which does not really go well with poppyseeds.

Mmmmmmm, poppy seeds.

I will never pass a drug test, mostly because my bagel habit makes me look like an opium addict.

I suppose this fragrant period will pass once all the parts have baked a while, and then I can go back to my bagels in peace. Until then we just live with it and are having a very good time playing with the knobs and seeing if we can get the sunroof to open.

The highway mileage is fantastic.

2 comments:

Jack Lynch said...

From the "Harper's Index" in the July 2009 issue of Harper's Monthly: "Number of poppyseed bagels that could be made with
Afghanistan's annual poppy harvest: 357,000,000,000."

KimK said...

Jack, you're clearly a man on sabbatical. :)