My First Bagels!

From For Blog - created Sept 09

First, a little background. My kids are starting to eat us out of house and home! My older two are especially fond of blueberry bagels. If I allowed just Nathan to eat his fill, I have calculated that my bagel budget would be $40 per month! And that's just for one child. So I decided to try making them myself - mostly just to see if I could save some money but also because I was curious about the process.

You see, I've had some excellent bagels when visiting different parts of the country, but we don't have much in the way of gourmet bagels around here. You are pretty much stuck buying Sara Lee at Walmart. There is a nice bagel shop (Manna Bagel) run by some Messianic Jews in the next town over, but they visit the Holy Land and close their shop about six months of the year - plus my cost savings would definitely disappear if I went that route. So having had a Southern Baptist grandmother instead of a Jewish grandmother, I had to rely on the internet for this one.

I used the recipe on this website and added dried blueberries. Rebecca thought they looked like huge, soggy Honey Nut Cheerios when they were cooking.

From For Blog - created Sept 09

In spite of that unappetizing metaphor, they actually turned out quite good!

From For Blog - created Sept 09

They were crispy and crunchy with a nice blueberry flavor. They really needed a few more blueberries to be wonderful - which may put my cost up in the Sara Lee category unless I can find a cheap source of blueberries. It really wasn't difficult or messy to make them, and they have no added fat -which leaves plenty of calories left for the cream cheese! I can't wait to try some new flavors like cinnamon, chocolate, bacon,cheese & onion, Asiago cheese, etc.