Baking bagels

Mr W has been eating a lot of bagels lately as an extra snack to help get him through the day without ending up totally exhausted and so today I thought I'd see if I could surprise him with some homemade ones....

Well, when I say 'homemade' I actually mean 'homemade with a bit of help from the breadmaker', but the thought was there.

This was the first time that I had ventured beyond the recipes in our breadmaker's User Guide to those in a breadmaker recipe book given to me many moons ago by my godmother. She gave me the book when we mentioned that we were thinking of buying a breadmaker, it took us at least another 2 years to actually buy said breadmaker and its been another 2 years of owning the breadmaker until I've actually been brave enough to try something different!

Things started well - adding ingredients to the mixing bowl in a specified order and selecting the 'dough' option on the breadmaker. A couple of hours later and the dough was ready to be shaped into bagels and these left to prove for 20 minutes. But then came the tricky bit - cooking the bagels in sugary water prior to them going in the oven. As soon as I put the first three in the pan of boiling water the join split and rather than being round like a bagel they instead looked rather like uncooked croissants. Not being one to panic I fished them out of the pan, turned the heat down prior to putting the next batch in and gave the join an extra squeeze together before dropping them in the water. Happily these all stayed semi-round and I gave the ones that split a little help in looking more like a bagel by pinning them together with a cocktail stick. 15 minutes or so in the oven and out came 8 golden bagels - not as uniformly shaped as those from the supermarket, but a taste test later this afternoon showed them to be perfectly edible. Now just got to wait and see what the bagel connoisseur thinks!

Isn't it just common sense?

So, I've been watching the new show on BBC2, 'Economy Gastronomy', and have realised that maybe I am in a minority when it comes to food and doing the weekly shop. In case you've not seen the show, it features two chefs trying to help a family reduce their large weekly shopping bill but without depleting the quality of the food they are eating, and in some cases improving it! One of the things they advocate is cooking one big meal that can then be transformed into something else on two other days, ok so I don't do that but the other things they proclaim all seem pretty logical and obvious to me...

One, plan what you are going to eat a week in advance. Maybe I'm a bit anal but if you don't know what you're going to eat how to do you know what and how much food to buy? Which leads nicely on to

Two, make a shopping list and only buy what is on your list. Ok, so I don't rigidly stick to the second part of this rule, but if I didn't have list when I went shopping the impulse buys would be far worse and I'd also probably end up forgetting vital ingredients. Actually I sometimes do this anyway when despite the planning I inadvertantly manage to omit a crucial ingredient from my list.

Three, homemade is better and cheaper than ready-made. Surely this is a no-brainer? I'm no expert on ready meals and how long they take to cook but I'm guessing if you don't have a microwave it's around 25-30 minutes. A quick flick through a modern cookery magazine (or even the freebies they hand out in the supermarkets) and you can find countless simple recipes that proclaim to be ready in 15 minutes. Ok, so the reality when you do it in your own kitchen is a little bit longer but you're still only talking the same time as your ready meal takes to cook and surely the satisfaction of eating something freshly prepared easily outweighs the effort involved in preparing it. Homemade cakes and cookies take a bit more effort compared with shop-bought ones, but ultimately they taste better and there is a certain joy in the whole process of mixing the ingredients and then the aroma of baked goods filling your house.

So these three things I've been doing for years - part of the joy of planning what to eat a week ahead means that it gives me time to flick through my magazines and find new recipes to try out meaning we don't eat the same old things all the time. It also enables me to plan combinations of meals to ensure that I'm not wasting food (I'm not perfect at this but I try my best not to let too many things take on a life of their own in the fridge). The shopping list allows me to make a smooth trip around the supermarket without needing to double-back to pick up things I've forgotten, well in theory it does. Inevitably life doesn't run smooth and sometimes that crucial ingredient isn't available and so I have to rapidly re-assess my meal plan and re-trace my steps to collect the appropriate ingredients. And although I love the homemade bit, I'm not religious about it and do buy some ready made items, like pizza and chicken kievs, where the effort involved in making them is too much. Plus, don't tell my mum but even more occasionally I will buy some shop-bought cake, although only things like Battenburg which with its checkboard design I can imagine being a nightmare to make....