Made last week from a recipe similar to this one.
22 thoughts on “Home-Baked Bagels”
Comments are closed.
Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Comments are closed.
I hope this is a sign that your power is on and your house is warm.
Those look good.
Power back on intermittently, house is sort of warm. But now the water is out…
I baked these last week – shared with the work crew putting in the new windows.
I came over to ask how do you weather this weather. Glad your power is back, even if sketchy. I know Texans are not used to it; my first thought if I hear of power outage would be to fill the bathtub and pots with water – separate functions, for sanitation and cooking.
Give us some periodic updates, pls!
My parents in NW San Antonio have been mostly without power since early Monday. They’ll be ok. It’s supposed to be in the 60s in a few days. The real thing to worry about is in a few years when New York and New England lose power for days in January, when the highs are in the 10s-20s for weeks.
@Brian – now you are talking. If we would have lost power here in Wisconsin last week when it was in the -20’s I’m not quite sure what we would have done. As it is, even with power, we have one iced up drain, several barn doors that failed from ice issues and one failed horse waterer. Small beer in the big picture.
20 and sunny yesterday never felt so good.
Hey Dan, the wife and I (well ok, mainly the wife) made the cherry banana bread (w/o the walnuts) and it was excellent!
Definite keeper of a recipe. Thanks!
Ah, the power and water issue … both have been unreliable here since early Monday … and people that we have talked to and managed to communicate with are pissed beyond words. This unusual winter storm was predicted almost a week in advance, and yet our mayor (whose’ reelection campaign has likely been stillborn) and the woman who is the ostensible head of City Public Services – our local utility … will be lucky not to be burned at stake by an outraged mob the next time she appears in public — since it now seems that he and she did absolutely nothing to prepare for a spot of bad weather that would not have been much out of the ordinary should it have happened in Utah of a normal winter. Nothing, zip, nada. People are beyond angry – there are some who have been without electricity since Monday. We have had intermittent power since then, without more than with. And no water in 24 hours, save a few dribbles for about an hour today. If we had not had three bottles of propane for the portable grill, a gallon of drinking water in the emergency closet and a couple of cases of distilled baby water from the local HEB (which was totally sold out of the regular bottled water) we’d have had nothing hot to eat or drink for the last two days.
The Daughter Unit and I collected snow and meltwater from the gutters all today, and saved to the bathtub in the small bathroom, or poured into the toilet tanks in order to have something to flush with.
I deduce that the Green Nude Eel concept is dead in Texas, as of this last week. Something about living a couple of days in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “The Long Winter</em>” will do that to one.
The biggest failure I see is zero communication between the authorities and the people who are without power, about status, prognosis, etc. Here in NY we get texts when power goes out, projected time to repair, etc. It’s pretty inexcusable that TX has nothing like that.
Yeah, Brian – we would’t have minded that at all – a text message saying, hey, in fifteen minutes your power will be out for umpty-umpty minutes our hours. Yeah, we could plan around that, but nope … oops, here the power goes, without any warning. We had a bare forty minutes this morning, just enough to get up when the lights came on, fix a cuppa morning tea or coffee and check our email messages … and then wham … off it went.
When I was first looking at homes in Tucson, I was still commuting to Phoenix a couple of days a week and wanted something close to I 10. We looked at several places on 5 and 10 acres as I was thinking about a generator. We finally settled on 1 acre closer to stores and restaurants.
Freezing temps were not a concern but in another location it would be. When we lived in a beach town in CA 40 years ago, we had so many outages by SDG&E, the utility pre-Gray Davis, that I was looking at a diesel powered generator. I already had an illegal 440 gallon diesel tank under a slab in the side yard. Those were the days of gas lines and I had all diesel cars. The company that serviced the school bus terminal down the hill supplied us once a month. The neighbors never seemed to notice the fuel truck in our driveway.
I wonder if the present owners ever found the oil tank ? Its vent came up in a flower bed. I had a pump to fill the cars.
Sgt. Mom, glad to hear you are relatively ok. Any concern on the broken pipe front or did it not get that cold there?
We are up the road a bit near Kyle, Texas. We had intermittent power until Tuesday at 8:30 a.m. when it went out. Didn’t come on again for 30 hours. Yes, the worst part was lack of communication by our utility. We have a generator and used it to keep the food in the fridge and chest freezer at safe temps and to charge our devices. Also had quite a bit of firewood left, so it was not that bad. But the roads were impassible (ice) and we were a bit stressed wondering what we’d do when the wood ran out if the outage went on through today.
Our development is on a well which miraculously kept working throughout the week. The well went out after Hurricane Harvey so we now know to save bathtub water for flushing and stockpile drinking water.
Not fun, but it has made me truly appreciative of the miracle of electricity. And insulation.
@T Migratorious – I also live on well water and naturally have a well pump to get the water up to us that is run on electricity. How does yours work without power?
Dan–
I am not sure about the well but here’s my theory. It is a community well located on another street and they apparently had intermittent power while ours was completely out. Thus I think the pump was still working during the outage. Alternate theory is that when they upgraded the storage tank last year, they may also have installed some kind of emergency generator, but my money’s on the first theory.
P.S. When we lost power during Hurricane Harvey, the well did go out completely. That’s why we were more prepared this time.
Good on ya T. Hoping this all gets over with sooner rather than later.
C., thank you for the update. You’ve good old ingenuity and common-sense thinking – which seems totally lacking in people who are paid to oversee emergencies just like this.
Yes, here in NYC I receive emails and texts from utilities Cos when ahead of bad weather – with advice and emergency contacts included.
Was just reading a post by an energy engineer: he said
-TX is naturally suited for wind farms and solar banks, being flat and sunny. These two kinds make very good economic sense as well, with cost of production and distribution below other kinds
-it is not specifically wind/solar that froze; at the coal and gas power stations, and even nuclear one equipment got frozen. the reason is that it was not designed to withstand these temps. the stations up north use equipment specifically designed and tested for lower temps.
-it is a freak weather conditions, last time occurred in 1903. makes no sense to purchase and install equipment based on freak occurrences that happen once in a century
however, it pays to know what to do in case it happens.
Best frozen conditions story comes from Nextdoor. Couple moving to a nearby town was separated: him with the furniture in Austin and her in the new house. He asked if any neighbors could spare matches and food that didn’t require a can opener for her. This being rural Texas, she was overwhelmed with everything she could need plus home cooked goodies and a new network of neighbors to watch over her. They are moving from England and couldn’t believe that Texas hospitality was even better than they’d anticipated. Nice story.
@T – there will be literally thousands of those types of stories that will be 100% ignored by the media.
The sight of Sgt. Mom’s bagels reminded me of a personal tragedy far more serious than a winter storm. My brother-in-law in Germany, an outstanding cook and baker, made Krapfen for the German Fasching (fat Tuesday), and I won’t get any. Krapfen look like our “Bismarcks” but are made with a different kind of dough and, when done right, taste infinitely better. They’re light as air, and melt in your mouth. Even in Germany it’s hard to find really good ones. I’ll probably never taste their like again. Alas!
Our pipes seem to have escaped without harm, Dan – although it did get well-below freezing. There was a massive 24-hour long water outage all across northern San Antonio during the coldest stretch; our pipes seem to have been empty during it, and the water returned very gradually over about twelve hours, so no damage so far that we can detect. We had taken care also to have all the taps dripping, from the very start; we’ve lived in below-freezing areas before!
Alas, it began snowing again – hard! – this morning at about 8:30. It’s predicted to snow all day today, and drop to the twenties tonight. So far, though, the water and electric power are holding out. We took the opportunity to do a couple of loads of laundry.