tea and toast

As a young child I would have tea and toast

This usually implied that i had what we euphemistically refer to as "loose motions".

In any case, tea and toast both a bit of of a treat and a challenging exercise.

You see, to appropriately consume tea and toast, one must dip the toast in the tea.

A simple constraint you would think. Let us work through a full example.

You have a cup of hot tea. in a cup mind you, not a mug. Its widens a bit towards the top but not that much.

You also have a toasted slice of bread. A mostly square piece edged by a crust of lesser desirability than the central portions of the toast.

The first move is standard. One of the corners of the toast is dipped into the full cup of tea. (more advanced practitioners note the asymmetry of the bread when deciding which corner to dip first). The moistened corner is allowed to drain excess tea back into the cup and only the moistened portion was consumed. You will note that the level of tea has gone done and this poses issues as the aforementioned tapering of the cup means with each dip you are reducing the surface area of dippable tea.

The next dip is a matter of preference though most of the first few steps converge onto the same and more difficult state of toast. The next dip could be one of the other corners OR one can take a shot at the pointy shapes adjacent to the semicircle of the first bite.

In my opinion its better to attempt the adjacent corners (not the diagonally opposite one) first and depending on the size of the bite and the bread, the aforementioned pointy parts will become a single triangular/plateau shape suitable for dipping into the diminishing tea levels. The optimal strategy here is to dip just the remaining crust edges and do away with them.

Some of you might say, why not just break pieces of the toast off or (shudder) fold the toast in half? If you are even thinking that, please leave this url immediately, clear your cache and never come back here again.

Now that we have got rid of the riff raff, let us proceed. Leaving the opposite diagonal corner alone gives you a dry part to hold onto. Those of you whose grandmother did not tell you that anything wasted on your plate after a meal is going to have to be picked up using your eyelashes when you die and go to heaven, may be even be inclined to actually discard that corner piece. Face it, no sane person likes the crust. We should consider it to be disposable cutlery. The only reason we eat through it on other edges is to get to the better inside part.

Anyway if you do it right, after a few bites, you have eaten off three corners and the crust and have only the delicious non crust part left to dip at will and enjoy.

A little butter on the toast is also a heavenly enhancement to the process. Nothing like seeing a little tiny oil slick on your tea.

With a little practice, tea and toast can be a most fulfilling exercise of the mind and body, much better than pilates, yoga or wii fit.

Unless of course your servant had burnt the toast and then scraped off the charred parts and served it to you. That's just not cool