Bonnie's Barefoot Journey: February 2017

Onion Bagels

I have had a few weeks of writer's block. Perhaps even goals block. Sometimes the vision gets blurry and hard to articulate. Sometimes spring feels so far away. But dreams like this one don't come easy, and so it naturally follows that the words won't flow all the time. So lets just talk progress.

In the past few weeks, I've done little garden work other than seed sorting, and I just borrowed the equipment to extract the honey from my failed hives- so more to follow on that in a future post. I have spent most of my spare time in the kitchen, covered in flour. I've tried several new recipes, mostly breads, along with three weeks of bagel making. One of the classes from my home school education was running a bakery. It was a class blending baking, accounting, small business management, and several other skills into what most of my education could be summed up as: Preparation for Real Life. My cousin and I were responsible for purchasing and maintaining inventory, advertising, calculating costs and profits as well as perfecting the baked goods sold from our little business. Our best seller was by far the bagels.

I can't remember if we dabbled in toppings or flavors, but this time I wanted to experiment with a few recipes. Adding toppings was fairly easy, but including fruit proved to be a much more complicated process. My son rarely eats any of my baked goods, but he was so excited to try my bagels, and requested his favorite: blueberry bagels. In the past three weeks, I have used three different recipes with slightly different methods. I have tried the recipe with fresh and frozen blueberries, and while I can say fresh integrate better into the dough- I have finally found a recipe that I despise baking!

Blueberry Bagel blob

Baking has always been a therapy for me; it comes naturally, and even if I am bone tired, rolling out a crust can energize me in ways few other things can. Blueberry bagels, however, suck my baker's soul. The moisture from the berries is so unpredictable, and adding large amounts of flour to compensate weakens the flavor of the dough to a flour paste with burst blueberries smeared through. Have I turned you off enough to my blueberry bagels? Other critics besides my son enjoyed them, but he refused them after one bite.

Blueberry Bagels after baking

My son has very odd taste in food; so when I find a baked good he loves, I'm overjoyed to make it for him. I think that is perhaps the reason this recipe drained my energy. I don't eat a lot of my baked goods. My biggest joy is watching others devour them. I rarely bake items based solely on what I desire; if I did, there would be a lemon meringue pie on my counter every week. So to see four hours of baking result in rejected bagels was a soul sap for me. There's a pride to creating something others love. But this should not be my only source of pride. There had to be a recipe at some point in my baking endeavors that wouldn't meet expectations- and blueberry bagels was the one. I'm sure it won't be the last, either. It is a dangerous trait to be fueled by pleasing others. Some external motivation isn't a bad thing; in a business, it's necessary! For me, though, as a self-identified trait, I need to watch this external motivation of receiving self affirmation out of pleasing others in my everyday life. So, the blueberry bagels were a flop. It's alright to flop, as long as we take out the bowl tomorrow to try another recipe.

Meme from the internet- my bagels looked like neither depiction!

Rather thank drag this post on with other baking endeavors, since it's been s long since my last post, I will just attach pictures of my recent baking adventures.