Bagelicious.. And Banana Bread Too....

So far today, instead of cleaning the house as I'd planned (have to get it cleaned before my baby bro comes to visit on Tuesday as he hasn't seen our new house yet!) I baked.

Recently I've been eating a bagel for lunch a couple of days a week as I can grab one on my way into work and I've been alternating between Dunkin' Donuts and Finagle a Bagel, neither of which really satisfies my craving for a really delicious bagel (after all, this is Boston, not NYC- it's known for baked beans, not bagels.. ) So I've been toying with the idea of baking my own bagels...

Last night while perusing Tastespotting (my fave website!) I came across someone who had made their own bagels using the recipe from the King Arthur's Flour website which is full of information on how to make a simple bagel. I looked in the cabinet and we had most of the ingredients necessary so I thought I'd give it a whirl.

And I have to say, all in all it was pretty easy. There were a few setbacks, one being that we couldn't find the Instant Yeast called for in the recipe and had to use Active Dry Yeast so I attempted to solve that dilemma by adding warm water to the dough instead of the cool water suggested by the recipe (Instant Yeast can be added to dough on its own, Active Dry Yeast must be "proofed" in warm water first.) I think they would have risen a bit more with the proper yeast but they still turned out pretty well.


The second setback was when I removed the bagels from the oven after 15 minutes to add the toppings. A whole sheet of 6 bagels slid right off the parchment paper. 5 of them landed in the oven and the 6th landed on the floor. I screamed and grabbed for the bagels, promptly burning my index finger.

Fortunately we've enacted the 5 Second Rule in our house and the dogs were particularly slow in responding due to the heat so I was able to save the bagel with a quick dusting off. Hubby came to the rescue with his asbestos hands to rescue the other bagels from the oven.

A dozen bagels came out of that oven, nice and chewy and crispy and absolutely delicious. There were a half dozen salt bagels and a half dozen sesame bagels and they were so tasty that I even got a kiss from Hubby as a thank you...

Oh and the banana bread- we had some overly ripe bananas sitting on the counter so I whipped up a quick one using a recipe I found by searching food blogs (here's another great link: Food Blog Search) for a banana recipe. The first one that came up was banana bread and since the only needed ingredients were flour, sugar, vanilla, butter and an egg I was able to whip that up in no time. I'm not a huge banana bread person but I have to say it was pretty tasty!

So that's been the day so far... Perhaps now that it's after 3 I'll get started on the cleaning!