I love the word ‘toastie’. I’m not at all sure I know what it means, mind you, and I’m fairly certain it doesn’t mean what I’m currently calling it, but it’s a great word. So I am going to gleefully misuse it for the time being, and will choose to assume that it means ‘a toastie thing with grilled cheese on it’. So there.
I’ve been under the weather for most of this week, and after a few days of this, I tend to start getting depressed as well. At around day four of any malady, I start assuming that the pain will not ever stop, that I will feel sick and miserable for the rest of my life, that this is it. And then I start contemplating the fact that when I was about seventeen, I had this very vivid belief that I would be dead before I was forty. And I’m now thirty-eight. Yep, less than two years to go. This is clearly The Beginning Of The End.
And so that’s what the inside of my head looks like right now. Well, not right now, or I’d be curling up with my head under the doona again, but for most of the last few days. As of about an hour ago, I started suspecting that, in fact, I might live. Which is almost certainly the benign outcome of all the asparagus I had for dinner.
Anyway, you are probably here for the toasties and are wondering why you were just treated to the dark side of my somewhat neurotic psyche. I’m sorry. I don’t actually know the answer to that question, either. I suspect you are just lucky.
The point is, however – and yes, I do have a point – that toasties are one of the best foods to make when you aren’t feeling very flash. Any meal that can be prepared in under ten minutes is a meal that is your friend. If it contains melted cheese (the definition of comfort food), it is your very good friend. And if you manage to make it so that you shoehorn a whole lot of vegetables into the meal, too, in a handy, minimal-preparation format, it is not just your very good friend, but your very good friend that might actually be providing you with some useful vitamins.
This is my favourite kind of edible friend. (Note: most of my friends are not edible. I assume. I haven’t been going around nibbling to find out.)
And vegetable-infested cheese on toast is one of my favourite kinds of meal. This one is especially good, of course, because it contains asparagus.
And that right there would probably have been introduction enough, without any of the neuroses. Then again, if you were looking for concise introductions and no neuroses, you probably wouldn’t be reading this blog in the first place…
Your Shopping List
Four slices of good bread (sourdough is good, but if you found beetroot bread at the deli, that is even better, because it is PINK.)
2-3 tablespoons of hummus
2 roasted red peppers
12 nice, fat asparagus spears
olive oil
salt, pepper
1 big handful of baby spinach (about 50 g)
8 thick slices of haloumi cheese (about 150 g, but that really is a guess)
Continue reading →
