Story from December

I can't remember if I've told this story yet, but my parents didn't seem to recognise it, so I'll tell it again just in case.

The first friend I visited over my Christmas holiday lived outside of Glasgow. One of the first days I was there, my friend was at work and so it might have just been myself and her mother home (I'll call her Mum to make things simpler), and I went into the kitchen to make myself a grilled cheese sandwich.

I ran into a few problems.

First, I told Mum I was going to make myself a grilled cheese. They call them "toasties".

Second, I asked Mum if she had a skillet. "A what?" A small frying pan? "A what?" I rummaged through her pans until I found what I wanted. Mum makes toasties on a sheet in the oven, not on a pan on the stove.

Third, the only bread they had was unsliced. I am not very good at cutting bread evenly. In fact, I'd never really tried until Scotland. Also the bread-cutting knife was not what I expected. The end result: two wedge-shaped chunks of bread with dangly bits where the knife caught the bread at angles.

Fourth, no American cheese. Not that I can blame them, American cheese is not the best, but for grilled cheese. I think I might have used cheddar, and was similarly horrible at slicing even, thin slices.

When it came time to the actual grilling of my sandwich, that was kind of a disaster. The thinner part of the wedgy-bread got burnt while the cheese underneath the thicker part hardly melted. It didn't help that I didn't understand Mum's electric stove. And the margarine was somehow not what I expected it to be, so it didn't quite cook as anticipated.

It was a pretty decent sandwich I suppose, just took a lot more work to make.