Our new thing...

We have a little battle in our house, lately.

Before I met my husband, I was a bit of a natural foodie freak. There was no soda, sorry, pop, in my fridge. No frosted flakes in my pantry. No instant anything. But I smoked, so he kind-of called me out.

Well, years later, the lung disease put an end to the smoking thing. Since I'm at home now, and I have not much better things to do, I've gone back to my old ways. Biggie is not happy. He has gone so far as to say he thinks I need to "go see someone" about how I grocery shop & cook. He doesn't even know about the quest to find locally produced organic beef. He's fine with all the veggies, and will eat pretty much anything green as long as I make my homemade dressing for it. He has a borderline obsession with my roasted chicken, has mastered the ability to reproduce my mashed potatoes. He doesn't understand why I buy so much yogurt. His biggest issue is that he is not happy with my bread.

I am a carb freak. The circumference of my thighs can be directly attributed to the prolific basil plant, cheap pecorino at the nearby Italian market, & pasta. I started a carb revolution a few months back with the purchase of an awesome book (Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Bread's) and the commitment to only use whole grain flour. The half bag of white flour in the pantry is being saved for Christmas cookies, & if I can't master the whole grain version by then, pannetone. I have made several different loaves of the ones in this book, & yesterday it was bagels.

Mini Me loves to help me in the kitchen & I find ways to have her help me with the bread. My lung disease keeps me mostly housebound during these sweltering months, and baking has provided us an outlet for our boredom. A new friend of mine, Tika, & her daughter Gabby, came over for a playdate yesterday. Before they left Gabby & Mini Me helped me add sunflower seeds to the dough & roll out the bagels. I wish I thought to take a picture of them but I am new at all this, & I think supervising two preschoolers with massive available amounts of flour is sufficiently ambitious. This is Mini Me supervising the mixer, however...

Biggie can't quite bring himself to love the bagels. This batch is exactly what he requested, sunflower seeds & salt. Yet, he says they need to rise more. He says I'm doing something wrong when I boil them. Let me just say that I know quite well how lucky he is to have a wife that bakes homemade bread several times a week and somehow manages not to bash him one when he even slightly wrinkles his nose about it. Bear with him. He's Italian. If it doesn't have copious amounts of something bad for him, it's not worth his time. I promise. I will not let him get to me. This is all part of my passive aggressive way to his heart, by keeping it healthy, through his stomach.

And this is a final product shot. There are only three left today, when there were seven yesterday. Next I will make whiny man some raisin ones.