This morning I got up and I went down to the kitchen. Normally I have a pretty set morning routine. Unless I’m running late for whatever reason, like unless I overslept or spent too much time laying awake in bed but not moving, just kind of staring at the ceiling, thinking about funny scenes from random episodes of Seinfeld or The Simpsons, I’ll go downstairs, I’ll make a pot of coffee.

While the coffee brews, I always take my dog Steve for a walk. And that’s exactly what I did this morning, just like every other regular morning. And I have everything timed just so, or, I should say that it’s not me actively doing the timing, but things just happened to be timed in such a way that by the time I come back in the house with Steve, I can hear the coffee machine, its three beeps: “beep, beep, beep” telling me that the coffee’s done.

And so it’s coffee, it’s breakfast. Ninety percent of the time I’ll have a bowl of cereal. I love cereal. But I also love making use of all of my groceries. And so today as I reached to grab that box of cereal, I happened to look down at the counter, at this plastic bag with two sandwich rolls inside. I had bought them three days ago, thinking I’d make, you guessed it: a sandwich. But I don’t know what happened, I got distracted, I forgot about the bread, maybe I ate some leftovers.

Whatever may have or may not have been the case, I was looking at these rolls. They were from the deli section, so it’s not the type of bread that I can just keep in the kitchen for a week, a week and a half, and expect to stay fresh enough for consumption on its own. No, these fresh bakery style rolls need to be taken care of, ideally, within one day, two days tops. Like I already said, today was day three.

I thought, just throw them out. They cost less than a dollar. And I was about to. I had my foot on the garbage can, the pedal, it’s one of those garbage cans with a pedal that you step on to pop the lid open, and I was just about to chuck the bag inside. Still, I felt an apprehension, I didn’t want to waste the food. I was getting mentally stuck here, blocked, all while my hunger steadily mounted.

Out of nowhere, a flash of insight, an idea: what about French toast? I remembered reading somewhere, a cookbook, a newspaper article, something about how French toast was originally developed as means of breathing fresh life into stale bread. Then my brain started really making some connections, I thought about bread pudding, I pictured croutons, homemade breadcrumbs. Whereas I was just minutes ago ready to toss these two rolls away, now I had the opposite problem, I couldn’t decide what to do with them, it was like I was overwhelmed with too many options.

But again, I was hungry. Bread pudding, one, it would’ve taken too long, and two, that’s not really a breakfast, it’s a dessert. That’s why I’m not a huge donut for breakfast fan. I love donuts, but come on, it’s just an excuse to eat cake right away. Croutons or breadcrumbs? Not enough to constitute an entire meal. French toast it was.

It was good. It was OK. Like a dummy I forgot to grease the pan, so you can just imagine the sticking-to-the-pan problems I had to deal with. Who forgets to grease the pan? I just chalked it up to hunger, the same hunger that probably made me reach not for my good silicone spatula, but the cheap plastic one, and so when I tried to scrape the bits from the pan, the black plastic started to melt. I tossed that cheap-o spatula away without any hesitation.

But yeah, it was tasty. I used milk, eggs, vanilla extract. Nutmeg would have been nice, but unfortunately I guess I don’t keep it regularly stocked. It’s more of like a fall/wintertime spice if you ask me, although if it tastes good I don’t see why anything should be limited to a particular time or season. But yeah, it was fine, tasty, a nice breakfast.

Happy April Regulars Day everybody!