So yesterday evening, I made spaghetti squash, which was good as always, because I put butter, parmesan and mozzarella, and diced tomatoes in it and baked it up like a casserole. Anyone who hasn't ever made spaghetti squash should definitely try it; I never had any growing up, nor had I even heard of it until Jeannette brought it for lunch one day. It's easy to make and is the consistency of pasta but better for you!

After this fun dinner, I got in the mood to make something for dessert, but I knew that cakes or cookies would take a long time and that we probably didn't have all the right ingredients. I pulled out my trusty copy of Joy of Cooking and looked at the dessert and bread recipes, and I happened upon a great recipe for sour cream coffee cake which I made. It was sooooooo good with our decaf Starbucks coffee (we have to drink decaf in the evenings, something I forgot last week before my Schenker exam when I had three cups of coffee after dinner and then woke up at 7 a.m. all jittery and hyper-alert).

While I was looking at all the bread recipes, I saw one for bagels, and I thought, "No, impossible." However, I read through the directions, and it was a lot like the pretzel recipe Popop and I used when I was young (that was our tradition), so I figured it couldn't be terrible. I actually made them after I got home from church today, and they turned out really well, even though they're fairly small. I made 13 (a baker's dozen, though it was inadvertent) from the recipe, even though it suggested making 18, so I can't imagine how tiny they would have been if I had tried to get more out of the one ball of dough!

I have learned one thing, though; from now on, whenever I see the words "ungreased baking sheet" in a recipe, I plan to ignore the "ungreased" part completely. The first batch, which was 9 of the 13 bagels, left all their bottoms behind on the cookie sheet. Luckily, I figured it out before the second batch (the remaining 4) had cooked much, so I pulled them out of the oven, greased the sheet underneath them, and put them back in. At least we have four with real bottoms. This is not the first time I've had something stick to an ungreased baking sheet when it wasn't supposed to, so from now on, I'm going to take the word "ungreased" as an indication to do the exact opposite.

Does anybody else have this problem, or am I just weird? I suppose if we had Teflon cookie sheets, it wouldn't be such a problem, but we have insulated ones so things won't burn. Perhaps there's a trade-off I wasn't aware of. =) Regardless of the problem with their bottoms, they are really tasty, and I would highly recommend the recipe. (We made yummy bagel pizzas tonight after Nicole's suggestion, plus some green bean casserole since I was in the mood for it.) Making the bagels did take a long time, though, since I was the only person rolling them all out, so if you can solicit some help, that's probably a good idea. Jack would have helped if he hadn't been at work. I think for the next batch, I'll probably wait until he's home. All in all, it was a success. Now I'm going to go eat some reheated coffee cake that won't be as good as it was last night, but I'll survive!

Labels: coffee, kitchen adventures

• posted by erica 5/16/2004 10:19:00 PM
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