give us this day...

As you may have noticed, we’re branching out a bit with our monthly spotlight features, and we thought a feature on bread was long overdue as we approach the end of British Summer Time and the idea of baking loaves in the oven ready for soup dunking becomes even more appealing.

We’ve also noticed, at least locally, that houses seem to be selling again, and we ALL know that the smell of bread baking helps give prospective buyers that warm, homely feeling when they’re looking around your house.

Click through for five great reasons to bake your own bread, and for six bread recipes including:

• Banana Bread
  
• Herby Seed Bread
  
• Home-made Bagels

So we were sitting here at like 11pm and we both realized we were hungry again (big surprise there). We then went on to make bagels that we’ve been wanting to make since forever. We found a few recipes online, adjusted them a bit, and at 1:15am we stood in our kitchen eating fresh hot bagels right out of our very own oven.

We decided to boil them first (since Josh watched an episode of “How It’s Made” and they showed bagels being boiled before baking) and then baked them for about 15-20 minutes. For some reason boiling them first just seemed to make sense…almost like we were bagel bakers in a past life or something… Anyway, just look at the picture! They were perfectly toasty on the outside and soft on the inside.

I grew up eating buttered bagels for breakfast. My dad still cannot start a morning without a toasted bagel with soy butter or vegan cream cheese and jelly. My Aunt Toni lives on Long Island and it’s pretty much an unspoken rule that every time she comes here to Virginia to visit she must bring along at least a dozen New York bagels…because if you’ve been to New York and eaten a bagel, you know that there’s no bagel as good as a New York bagel. We’ve pretty much stopped buying bagels because I just can’t seem to eat one of those Lender’s bagels that come pre-cut and all that..they’re just not good. Not when you’re used to eating NY bagels. But these bagels…yeah..they’re no NY bagel but damn they’re good.

Stay tuned for variations…we’ve got tons of ideas to jazz these puppies up.