Bagels

I've been wanting to make bagels for ages, and this weekend I finally did! It was surprisingly easy. There are a lot of good looking recipes out there that require sponges and two days of effort, but the recipe I found (New York-Style Bagels) was really straightforward and low fuss. Most importantly, the bagels turned out really well (if I do say so myself!), although I need to work on my dough ball making skills - shape and size consistency was fairly low :)

New York Style Bagels

 Makes 8 medium bagels

2 tsp active dried yeast

1 1/2 tbsp sugar

1 1/4 cups warm water (you may need another 1/4 cup)

3 1/2 cups very strong white bread flour

1 1/2 tsp salt

Optional Toppings: sesame seeds, coarse sea salt, pumpkin seeds, poppy seeds, cinnamon, raisins

1. In a small bowl, add sugar and yeast to 1/2 cup warm water but don't stir. Let sit for 5 minutes until frothy, then stir until yeast and sugar are completely dissolved.

2. In a large bowl, mix together flour and salt. (If you're making cinnamon bagels and you want the cinnamon mixed throughout, as opposed to marbled swirls, add 3 tsp cinnamon and 1/2 cup raisins now.)

3. Make a well in the centre of the flour. Add the yeast and the remaining 3/4 cups of warm water. Stir until just combined, then tip out onto a lightly floured surface and knead for 10 minutes.

4. If you're making cinnamon bagels and want cinnamon swirls throughout the dough, sprinkle the cinnamon and raisins onto the dough now. Knead briefly to combine.

5. Set the dough in a lightly oiled bowl, turn to coat, then cover with plastic wrap and let rise in a warm place for at least 1 hour, or until doubled in size.

  

6. Once the dough has risen, separate into 8 equal pieces. 

7. Roll each piece into a smooth, round ball. **This is where I had trouble. A skin had formed along the top because I'd forgotten to turn the dough. The skin made the dough tough to roll. If this happens to you, I found oiling your hands a little bit and working that into the dough helped, but probably the best is just to prevent the skin from forming in the first place :)

8. Poke your thumb through the centre of each dough ball, then widen the hole slightly by wiggling your thumb. Cover the bagels with damp paper towel and let rest for 10 minutes.

9. Put a large pot of water to boil and preheat the oven to 220C / 425F. Cover a baking sheet in parchment paper, and spray the paper with non-stick spray. If you have cornmeal or semolina flour, you can sprinkle a bit of that around the paper as well.

  

10. Once the water is boiling, use a slotted spoon to lower each bagel into the water. Let the bagels boil for 1-2 minutes (2 minutes for extra chewiness), then turn over and boil for another 1-2 minutes, depending on the desired chewiness.

11. Use a slotted spoon to remove the bagels from the water and place them on the prepared baking tray.

  

12. If you're adding any toppings, use an egg wash to coat the tops of the bagels and apply the toppings. 

13. Bake for 20 minutes, or until evenly browned. The bottoms should sound hollow when tapped. 

You can eat them right away (mmm...so good!), but set whichever ones you don't eat on racks to cool.

Rhossili Beach

One of the absolute best things about Swansea is the beach. I cycle along the coast to campus every single day and I still never get tired of it. On sunny days, nothing beats going to the beach and taking a walk. Nothing :)

When summer comes, there will be multiple beach barbecues to look forward to, but as it's still winter, my friend and I just went for a hike at one of my favourite beaches along the Gower Peninsula - Rhossili. The tidal range here is incredible, and the beach stretches on for miles. Today was even a little sunny (!!) so it was extra fantastic - we saw wild horses, sheep (of course), and a seal (well, it was a seal carcass, but it was still evidence of seals being not far away. So I will include it in my wildlife count for the day. You have to take what you can get here, I think). Afterwards, as with all good walks, we stopped for tea.

Anyway, I mostly just wanted to share the photos of the day - it was so pleasant and sunny, I just had to share.

Motivation

I feel like I start each year with the same blind optimism with which I started the last. I happily list my New Year's Resolutions (or goals, as I tried tricking myself into thinking of them as this year) in my journal, and tell myself, 'This is the year I'm going to get it together. This is the year I make great strides towards having a healthy and happy lifestyle. I'm going to become a real life version of the smiley woman on multivitamin packages and granola boxes, just wait!'

The sad truth is that too often and too soon my optimistic list becomes a record of my failure to change. And it's so frustrating - because I really do want to stop biting my nails forever, I want to get more than 5 hours of sleep every night, and I finally want to make it  through one non-fiction book in a year. I don't feel like I'm setting an unrealistic bar here!

Unfortunately, my problem is that as soon as I have a bad day where I miss some of my goals, everything goes down hill. I end up sabotaging myself and feeling frustrated and guilty about things until the next year when the whole cycle starts again. This can't be healthy.

This week has been fairly typical, which is not what I was aiming for, and which is why I'm writing this post. I had big goals this week - in bed by 11, up by 6, running 3 times a week, no food after 9 pm, at school by 9 am...I was going to be disciplined and energetic. And everything went perfectly well on Monday, but then yesterday happened. And then today. And now I can feel my spiral starting and I want to stop it before it goes any further.

I feel like I should acknowledge (in a somewhat public way, rather than just to myself in the bathroom mirror every morning) that yes, there will be missteps, and I will not meet my goals every day. Goodness knows chocolate can only be refused so many times before one spontaneously combusts...but I'm going to try to not give up on things this year, even when they start going wrong and I feel like I'm failing.

These photos were taken (by the amazing Bente!) in New Mexico, and have no connection whatsoever to the theme of this post other than they make me happy and remind me that things can be excellent (like the chili hot chocolate that was in that cup, or the hot air balloon ride over the New Mexico desert! Life can be SO GOOD!). But they seemed appropriate once I reasoned them out that way to myself.

I did try to find a picture that fit better with the theme, but all I could find was this. Which is, actually, appropriate, but not quite with the spirit of things :)

Happy New Year!

I hope your holidays were excellent! Mine were - I was able to go back to Edmonton for a few weeks and spent Christmas and New Years with my family. I won't be going home this summer (things will be too crazy at school - I'm writing up this year) so I won't see them again for a year...perhaps the longest I've gone without seeing my parents, now that I think about it... Needless to say, it was so very excellent to be able to catch up with friends and family, and to just have time to relax and be busy in the kitchen :) Here's a sampling of this year's experiments - the photos should all link to the recipe, and I think I can highly recommend them all, actually - great successes all around!

Anyway, I'm back in Swansea now, jetlagged and excited to get back into things. This year's going to be crazy, as I mentioned, but I think (I hope?!) I'm ready for it. I have to submit my thesis by December 2012, which is both terrifying, as it requires writing a thesis, and exciting, because I'm really looking forward to whatever is going to happen once I'm finished with all of this. The question of what I was going to do next came up frequently over the holidays, which is understandable but also somewhat frustrating. I've been trying to keep a fairly open mind about jobs and plans post PhD, and while I have a lot of ideas, I have no real expectations as to where I want to be or what I want to be doing directly afterwards.

I've been extremely fortunate up to this point in my life in that opportunities seem to present themselves when I get close to the end of a phase of my life, and I'm hoping/praying that this trend continues. When I first started university in 2001, I had planned on going on to med school and becoming a doctor. I realized fairly early on that that plan wouldn't pan out, and one semester a geography class was the only course that fit into my random 'keeping my head above water' schedule; it turned out to be my favourite course of all, and lead me in a direction I'd never considered. I hadn't planned on doing an MSc, but the chance came up right when I finished my BSc, and as a result I was able to travel and do some of the most interesting work with some of the best people I know. Similarly, a job filling in during a maternity leave became available exactly when I finished my MSc and wasn't sure what to do next, and while that job was beyond frustrating at times, it also taught me a lot about myself and what I could handle. The chance to move to the UK for a PhD literally fell into my lap when that job finished, and it's another chance I'm glad I took - while I feel like I got off to a bit of a rocky start, I have definitely come to love my life here.

All I mean to say by all of that, is that so far nothing has worked out according to any of my plans, and ultimately things have worked out better than I could have anticipated. So I've decided that rather than have any set plan, I'm just going to keep my eyes open this year and see where life takes me. Not in a crazy hippie kind of way - I do have ideas for jobs I'd like afterwards, I just don't have my heart set on any one thing in particular, so in that sense I'm going to keep an open mind.

As well as keeping an eye open for various jobs and opportunities, I'm focusing on getting fit this year - I turn 30 in April, and that, combined with the thesis and everything, it just seems like it's time to find a good lifestyle that will keep me energetic and fit and happy for the foreseeable future. So! My goals (I won't say resolutions, because if I do I won't follow them - I have a horrible track record!) for this year are:

- run 3 to 4 times per week
- run Forest of Dean 10k in < 1 hour (May 26th!)
- finish hiking the Three Peaks (I've only done Snowdon - I must do Scafell and Ben Nevis!)
- stop eating like 6 adult males and start eating like 1 adult female (However, I should be clear that I will not cut out anything from my diet -I  don't know if it's possible to live without bread, cheese and chocolate, and all diets seem to exclude these items...but I am going to try to eat less of things. That seems reasonable. Especially if I want to ever be able to buy a pair of boots that fit over my calves. Blasted German man calves...)

I have other goals for the year, but these are the ones I'll probably end up talking about most, so I thought I'd share them here. I'm off to a decent start I think, I went running this morning and I'm planning to go again tomorrow...we'll see how long I can keep it up!

Good luck with any and all of your goals and resolutions - and I hope 2012 is a great year for you :)