This morning I woke up with a yen for bagels.

No, scratch that. Yesterday morning I woke up with a yen for bagels, but because I’d slept in, and going out to get bagels would have required me to shower and get dressed, and going out to get bagels wasn’t really a good idea anyway (see Thursday’s post regarding unexpected and significant drop in income for the next few months), so instead we ate pie and cookies for breakfast. And then yesterday I sent out a plea on Twitter for someone to share with me bagel recipes that would actually work, and my sister-in-law came through. So this morning when I got up, I made bagels.

I have attempted to make bagels several times before, but all of those attempts have usually not been very successful. I’ve been doing quite a bit of baking, ever since the kitchen was redone (I even took a class at the local Kitchen Academy this summer with a friend – we spent three hours in a room with a baker from France and learned all kinds of wonderful things about yeast and gluten and dough, and when we left we were overloaded with huge piles of baguettes and breadsticks and foccacia and dinner rolls we had made ourselves, and it was So Much Fun), and while I am very, very good at rolls, and very mediocre at bread (it never rises as much as it’s supposed to), I have so far been completely unsuccessful at bagels. Despite doing all the correct steps (mixing, rising, boiling, baking), all previous attempts at bagels have always come out flat. No, I mean literally – the bagels emerge from the oven flat.

The recipe my sister-in-law sent me was an improvement on all the others I’ve tried, in that the bagels were much less flat than before. But they still do not possess that quality of ‘bagelness’ that I associate with a good, true bagel. Those round things you can purchase in stores, wrapped in plastic, have no business calling themselves bagels, because it’s obvious they missed out on that crucial ‘boiling’ step. But the bagels we used to get at the little local bagel place (before they closed down) and the bagels we now occasionally pick up at Noah’s, all have a dense, chewy consistency that I am so far unable to replicate.

This is not to say, of course, that they were not tasty. Because the bagels that I made this morning were certainly delicious. They just aren’t quite…bagels. Yet.

I also made a loaf of whole wheat walnut bread from a recipe on the back of the King Arthur White Whole Wheat Flour bag, mainly because it caught my eye. Naturally (see earlier comment regarding my continued mediocrity at creating pretty loaves), the bread that won’t really work for sandwiches turned out rounded and perfect. Bah.

After a morning spent playing with flour and yeast, it was nice to get out of the house and spend an afternoon up in the hills with some friends. We’ve been trying to coordinate a trip to Apple Hill with them for a few weeks now, but illness or work schedules kept getting in the way, so when we finally all had a free day, we grabbed it. This time, Richard and I did not buy any more apples (most of the apples we bought last week are still sitting on the counter because I have yet to drag out the apple corer/peeler/slicer gadget and get busy), but we did take advantage of the chance for more of the very best caramel apples, and apple pie, steaming fresh from the oven and drizzled with cider sauce. It was a perfectly lovely day to be outside, wandering around, looking at crafts and eating apples, and catching up with good friends.

Back home, a little more baking (I’d put dough for pretzels in the refrigerator yesterday morning), this time with Richard’s help (since rolling out all the pretzels goes faster with four hands than it does with two), and then we caught up on a few of our favorite shows on the DVR. And then we realized that the day was almost over and neither of us had cranked out a single word on our novels, so off to the computer room with us, for a few hours of furious typing, or at least in my case, not so furious, but enough short bursts of something resembling creativity to keep my word count just a bit ahead of the game.

Nanowrimo update: 13,562 words, some of which would be a lot easier if I wasn’t making them up out of thin air and then having to remember exactly how to *spell* them the next time they came into play.