Real Toast and Dip

Tags

coffee shops, Deerbrook Editions, Denny's, designer toasters, IHOP, Lipton's Onion Soup, Martina Reisz Newberry, Parties, Potato chip, vintage toasters

ABOUT TOAST

When I was a kid, well even when I was a young woman, toast was crispy. It had crunch.  You took the toast out of the not-a-designer toaster, put it on a plate, put something good on it and it crunched when you bit down on it. Maybe you dunked a little of it into some egg or your coffee.  But, prior to dunking it, it crunched.  TOAST NO LONGER CRUNCHES. It does not crunch at home from my super-expensive “vintage,” four-slice, four-settings, dial-a-color toaster.  It does not crunch at IHOP or Denny’s or any of my breakfast haunts.  See the picture on this blog?  That’s what toast USED to look like back a few years.  Toast left crumbs.  Toast did not–dagnabit!– wiggle and flop.  Now it does both.  If you dunk it, it falls to pieces.  Toast has become weak, spineless.  This distresses me.  It makes me sad every morning when I have toast.  Even if I set the toaster to it’s darkest, it gets dark, but not crispy.  It’s been a bad surprise for me for some 30 years.  WTF?  I think there is a very good possibility that man and womankind began to go downhill in a number of serious ways when toast quit being crispy.  Am I right?

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ABOUT DIP
NO ONE and I mean no one makes good old onion dip anymore.  You know the kind:  You take some onion soup and put in some sour cream and then let it sit awhile in the fridge and VOILA!  Onion dip.  At the gatherings I’ve been to in the past 3 or 4 years, I’ve had these dips:Chica Comfort Dip (no idea what this was, but I wrote it down)
Roasted Red Pepper Dip
Yellow, lumpy Dip
Warm Artichoke and Bacon Dip
Hot Tuna Dip (I skipped tasting this one.  It smelled funny.)
Some kind of purple dip
Red Eye Scallion Dip Rouille (no clue what this was)
Curried White Bean Dip (tasted just like cold white beans)
Blue Dip with yellow chunks in it
Artichoke Tomato Dip (this one tasted ok, but looked like a car accident)
Chipotle Salsa Dip
Chipotle Guacamole Dip
Curry Dip
Peppercorn Ranch Dip
Salmon Dip
Slow Cooker Ground Beef Dip
Spinach Dip
Strawberry and Peach Salsa Dip
Crab Dip

In each case, I searched the tables for some onion dip to go on my potato chips.  I had trouble finding potato chips at first.  There were dark blue crackers, and bright yellow crackers, and green crackers,and some pink chips and, purple chips.  Finally, hidden off in corners, I found some real potato chips. I carried those hard-earned chips through party after party, searching for onion dip.  Never did find any. I made do with some of the others, but my spirit was broken.  I have since offered to bring the dip and generally the host or hostess says, “That would be lovely.  Bring anything but onion dip.”  Sigh…