Bagels and dinners

C-- misses East coast bagels, so I've been learning to make them myself. Today I used King Arthur bread flour. It made the dough silky smooth and very elastic. It was totally different from before when I used sketchy little baggies of high-gluten flour that are hung up around this one store I shop at. Maybe I'm getting better, but it's probably just the flour. That said, the bagels made me pretty nervous when they went into the oven. Even after boiling, they were all lumpy and silly looking. But when they cooked, they became miraculously rounded and shiny!

The resulting bagels were a lot less dense than the ones I've made previously. They had an almost crispy, caramelized crust, and super soft middles. C-- went out and got cream cheese, hot smoked salmon and capers. Breakfast was really really good this morning.

I've been having a lot of fun cooking lately. The other night, we had a green-themed dinner. Everything we made was green. My friend M-- brought mixers for "grasshoppers", which are green, creamy mint-and-chocolate drinks. C-- made spinach pasta, and I made parsley pesto. Then I made pistachio and herb chicken rolls. The chicken tried to fall apart on me, so I plastered it up with some spinach. And then we had brocolli with mustard sauce. Oh, and I made green eggs for appetizers! They're deviled eggs where the mayo is replaced by pseudo-guacamole. It was all rather delicious.

The hero of this dinner was really our mortar and pestle. Those things are so much fun! They make you feel like a pharmacist or a witch. We ground up the spinach, and the parsley and garlic, and the pistachios, and all the herbs. All the smell-bits went up into the air. Our kitchen smelled like the recipe song by Simon and Garfunkel (that is, it smelled like parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme, except that we skipped the rosemary.)

Our next dinner will be pink themed. Vodka sauce, sun-dried tomato pasta, something with raspberries . . . we'll see what else!