Bagels!

Yeah, I made bagels. No big deal. Why is this a DIY, as opposed to any other food I made? Because bagels aren’t something you make. Well, at least they’re not something I make. I trust my local professional bageler. I mean, there’s a water bath involved! That’s pro stuff right there.

Or is it?

I just made some of the best bagels ever—and on my first try. After my amateur stunt, I can’t see what excuse grocery-store bakeries could possibly have for their crappy, white-bread-in-a-circle bagel wannabes!

I got this recipe online for my bread machine. It’s bread flour, salt, sugar, water, and yeast (of all things!), and the entire process, from measuring ingredients to beautiful, brown bagels, took around 2½ hours. And honestly, most of that time you’re not doing anything! The machines are doing the work for you.

Between the bread-machine phase and the oven phase, you’re charged with making your bagels bagel-shaped, boiling them in sugary water for a minute, then sprinkling them with whatever you want to sprinkle them with. I stuck with poppy for my first shot, but next time I’m doing an everything mix, dipping the damp bagels into it before placing them on the cookie sheet. It’s your chance to get way fancy! And the more stuff you top them with, the better you’ll be able to hide any imperfections.

And for the love of kittens, please enjoy your bagel in its pure form rather than toasting! Toasting is fine for old or inferior bagels. Your gorgeous, fresh, homemade gem has a chewy, tender texture you do not want to miss.

Late last week a friend posted on Facebook that she’d made French toast with homemade raisin bread. Holy crap, that sounded awesome. I got her recipe and it was waaaay easy to veganize, so off to the store to pick up some soymilk powder and raisins. I threw it all in the bread machine and a few hours later, amazin’ blazin’ raisin bread. I only had time and energy this weekend for toast (the photo was of course taken before the EB smothering), but methinks next weekend I’ll be chowin’ down on some Vegan with a Vengeance fronch toast.

The recipe (I used the “sweet” setting on my bread machine):
•1¼ c water   
•1/8 c sugar (damn you, WordPress, for not having more formatted fractions!)
•1½ t salt
•1½ T Earth Balance
•1½ T soymilk powder
•1 T cinnamon (make it a good one; I use Penzey’s)
•1 c raisins
•3 c bread flour
•1 t yeast

And what’s that wood and plastic thing in the photo? Why, it’s the way handy bread slicing guide I ordered through Amazon. It takes a little practice, but once you figure it out making your own bread makes a whole lot more sense—what good is a homemade loaf of sandwhich bread if you end up with uneven, too-thick slices? Nobody needs that mess.

Exhibit A: melted semi-sweet chocolate chips and hempseed. At most this takes 10 minutes to throw together, even in a microwave-free home. You don’t really taste the hempseed, but it’s pretty and oh so good for you.

Exhibit B: blackberry jam. Home-friggin’-made blackberry jam. A friend gave us a bunch of his backyard blackberries so I threw them in my bread machine with some sugar, lime juice, and pectin and hit the “jam” button. If I haven’t said it before (and I know I have), I heart my bread machine.

Whatever shall I put on them next? I’m thinkin’ somethin’ peanutty.

Every time I make this, I laugh. I laugh because I pick up my copy of Vegan with a Vengeance, open it to the recipe, and picture the mom on “Better Off Dead” trying to impress the foreign exchange student with her continental cuisine. And then I picture Ricky’s mom blowing up. Oh, ’80s cinema, you’re always there for me.

I alter the recipe in two ways: I add a couple shakes of really good cinnamon, and while I use plain Silk creamer, I opt for vanilla soymilk. This sweetens it up and gives it the flair only cinnamon can. And I may have been brought up to sprinkle my french toast with powdered sugar, but I’m now a splash-of-maple-syrup gal (the real stuff).

Today’s breakfast was a little more special because I used bread I made in my bread machine. It’s a really dense white bread with some Earth Balance and a smidge of sugar in it. Because it was pretty fresh, I threw the slices in the fridge for a while to dry them out. The results were favorable—or should I say flavorable—it was like a healthy donut, rich and moist.

After breakfast, we went on a bike ride (because we hit 60 today, unlike Chicago, where it snowed!) and saw maybe the saddest thing ever: a dad with his kids…wait for it…on unicycles. The 6-year-oldish boy was the only one still riding the unicycle. The dad was carrying his and the 4-year-oldish girl’s. I mean, I get it, it was his weekend with the kids and he wanted to do something fun, to share something he loved with them. But come on, isn’t the unicycle the reason she left in the first place?

I’ve written about these babies before, jessigurr’s burger buns on Vegweb. I halve the recipe for my bread machine, and this time I added a handful of poppy seeds and some dried onion flakes with the rest of the ingredients. Super good. And I bought pickles for the first time in years. As much as I hate vinegar, I really do love a good dill pickle. Hey, Michele, that burger sure looks beefy. It’s amazingly not, and I know some people might question how I dare call myself a vegetarian, but, um, yeah, I think that’s dumb. (If you’ve seen the latest VegNews, you know what I’m talking about. If not—or even if you have—check out Lindy Loo’s rant.) Beautiful.

And as if I hadn’t had my fill of cupcakes lately, we felt there was no better way to celebrate doubling our income than a trip to Sweetpea. These are coconut cupcakes, and they were like no other cupcake I’ve had. The cake itself was pretty hearty, like banana cake, and the frosting wasn’t that overly sweet, high-note coconut flavor, but a more mellow, rich one that just perfectly complemented the cake. I was going to photograph them all pretty on a plate, but then I thought, with coconut cupcakes, who needs presentation? They’re coconut cupcakes.

Nope, it’s not just a Big Black song (got a clip right here). We had ourselves a tofufish fry. I picked up a cajun cornmeal fish coating, which the guy at the fish counter promised would be good even if it wasn’t going on an animal, and dipped some frozen-then-thawed-n-pressed firm tofu in soymilk (with a little egg replacer mixed in). I pressed the coating on there as hard as I could to soak up all the moisture and make sure it would stick. Then five minutes or so in about a half inch of oil produced these crispy little fakey fish fingers.

I’d just salted them lightly and thought something was missing. Tom looked happy as could be as he dipped his in a little dish of lemon juice. Dare I? I dared. And it was perfect.

Off in the back you can just see a sliver of the garlic bread. The recipe I use for french rolls in my bread machine yields three 13-inch baguettes so I cut them in half and stick them in the freezer. It only takes 10 minutes in a 200° toaster oven to thaw them enough to slice and slather with garlic spread (minced garlic, salt, dried parsley, and nutritional yeast in EB and olive oil).

Then we got to spend a half hour tracking down a legal Big Black clip to share with you. It was a pretty good evening.

I have no photos for breakfast, which was…toast. But here’s part one of a two-part snackening that took the place of your traditional lunch. I’d found some half-decent tomatoes with promise over the weekend so they sat in my high-tech ripening machine (a paper bag) and eventually came out sort of red. And the basil was a nice surprise—I’d gotten used to summertime Hollywood farmer’s market basil bunches as big as your head for $1.50, followed by a few seasons of sad clamshells full of holey leaves trucked up from Mexico—but I found this organic basil from Washington at Whole Foods. I didn’t look at how much it cost. I figure I never believed in Santa so I allow myself these little moments of blissful ignorance from time to time.

 
Here’s part two. Stuffing or dressing or whatever you want to call it. I don’t think either name does it justice. They imply that this lovely “side” dish is but an accompaniment to something more significant. I suppose “baked reconstituted old bread with some vegetables and spices” doesn’t really roll off the tongue. Anyway, it fed me and made me happy and let me use up an old heel of white bread we’d made earlier this week.

This almost doesn’t count as bread, since I used a cornmeal crust. Who am I trying to fool? It counts. This is my third try with Teese. The yellowing is the oils in the Teese mixing with the tomato sauce, plus a little broilering at the end. After three attempts, I have to say it didn’t kick Follow Your Heart’s ass. It’s good, sure, but the hype seems like just that, hype. After working with it, I had to use dish soap to get the oil off my hands.

And here’s a deceptively yummy-looking photo. I used a basic white dough to make these cinnamon rolls, but I way underestimated how much cinnamon and sugar to use, so they came out tasting like mildly sweetish and cinnamonish bread. There’s potential here, though, so I’ll figure it out and let you know.

We got a bread machine! Tom’s mom didn’t use hers as much as she thought she would (and apparently, it was really loud), so we inherited it. So far we’ve made sun-dried tomato & oregano bread (pictured), french bread, and pizza dough (haven’t tried using this yet but it looks good). Today we’re going to try a wheaty/grainy bread and some herby rolls.

The timing is perfect. I’ve just had an angry freakout over ingredient labels and trying to get answers from a manufacturer. I’d picked up a package of Country Oven onion rolls at the regular grocery store. There was no “contains milk” allergen listing and none of the ingredients popped out as offensive, so we ate them. I took a closer look at the ingredient label and checked out sodium steroyl lactylate in the back of How It All Vegan! and saw “see lactic acid.” Ouch. There’s no way to tell where it came from, as lactic acid can come from animal or plant sources.

I understand that most of the world doesn’t care where their lactic acid comes from—I didn’t a couple of years ago—but I do now, so I asked the manufacturer. In a totally polite e-mail, I asked about the origin of the sodium steroyl lactylate. I received a “we got your message” reply…two weeks ago.

Guess what I’m never buying again. Country Oven can kiss my ass.