I’ll Show You How to Cook Toast

I’m a great one for liking to help others, big and small, human and non-human, one and all. My voluntary work has ranged from working with the Activ Foundation helping give respite care to intellectually disadvantaged children, to running a Youth Group for Community Aid Abroad, writing information leaflets for the Conservation Council of Western Australia, and helping the Australian Red Cross (AuRC).

Some years ago I helped the AuRC with their Breakfast Club for primary school children who didn’t have breakfast before they arrived at school.

No, this wasn’t because their parents were bad parents but because they had to go to work extremely early or there was only one parent who had to drop their child off at school very early to go work to earn the money to support them.

I thought it was a wonderful thing to have the Breakfast Club and volunteered to help out on Fridays, which included washing up and of course, serving brekkie to the little ragamuffins.

Well, brekkie was put out at long tables in the school library, and behind the breakfast fare were tables with toasters!

The kids weren’t allowed peanut butter because one of the kids might have an unknown peanut allergy, and for that matter, neither was vegemite on the menu, for who knows what reason I cannot remember in the mists of time.

So what did the children eat? Well, they had buttered toast and they had plenty of tinned fruit, including a lot of pears, which they enjoyed.

Now my partner has told me that I would do marvelously if I was on a television programme called “Disaster Chef” and this is because I don’t really like cooking.

Cooking, even basic stuff, is not my forte. So when I surreptitiously handed the first lot of hungry kids bread rather than toast, I thought “they’re just kids, they won’t notice it’s not actually toasted.”

For I didn’t know how to cook toast!!

To my awful surprise one of the children brandished a slice of the offending food and said indignantly “this isn’t toast.” 😃

That was the cue for a larger or older boy to dash behind the breakfast tables and to one of the toasters.

“Here I’ll show you how to cook toast”he declared, popping the bread in, and then as I earnestly looked on, he turned up the dial to full.

So that’s how you cook toast, I was astonished, and managed to eke out some better specimens.

But to cover up my goof, I befriended some mathematically minded kids.

I pointed at the many empty tins of pears, and said “Here look, you lot have eaten 8 tins of pears, and each tin contains 300 grams of pears, so altogether you have eaten 8 times 300 grams of pears.”

“And that’s 2400 grams which is 2.4 kilograms of pears” I ended with a flourish.

I was grateful when a small child opened his mouth and eyes with in-credulousness. He said “Wow I can’t wait to go home and tell mum that we ate 2.4 kilograms of pears.”

Pheww, got out of jail free, I thought. He won’t be going home saying “Mum, Dad, there’s a lady in the Breakfast Club who can’t cook toast.”

My term with the Red Cross lasted only a few months, then I had to bow out gracefully as I had more paid work pressing upon me, and that meant less free time, so that I couldn’t give the Breakfast Club the attention it needed from me.

But I can say that I was super glad at this timing, because just as I was leaving, someone decided that the kids should have something more substantial.

So, to my horror, a Breville toaster and cans of baked beans were brought out.

“How the heck do you cook baked bean toasties?” I wondered, but was put out of my misery, or saved by way of the term of “the cook who couldn’t make toast” ending!

Pheww, I only just graduated from cooking toast, what next?