Using What I Have Journal Entry #2: Homemade Bagels and a Dental Emergency

As I continued in my emotional struggle and staycation of sorts, I had the idea I should make my own bagels. (Does it count as a staycation if you spend it running errands? Is that an errand-cation?) This was in part because I have tons of poppy seeds, and figured making some poppy seed-topped bagels would be one way to get through them. And I was still coping by cooking too much.

Seriously, why did I buy an entire pound of poppy seeds!? Have I ever had a poppy seed emergency? Has anyone?

But bagels are supposedly so much better if you make them yourself. And I do like making my own breads. So I made some. I topped half with a generous sprinkle of poppy seeds, and the other half with everything bagel seasoning. I preferred the everything bagel seasoning, which I could make myself if I were to buy some dried garlic and onion and whatnot, and thus also have another way to use poppy seeds. Of course, I'll need to make hundreds of bagels if I'm to get through these poppy seeds in bagel form alone, but there are several other ideas I have for using the others up.

I did not find these bagels to be remarkably different from locally available shop bagels, but I do live in a bagel-prime area, I suppose. And it was kind of fun to learn how to make them. The recipe I used was from Vegan Huggs. I made my own bread flour with all purpose flour and wheat gluten, which may also be why these weren't necessarily all that remarkable. I don't know. I got nervous about boiling the dough, but it turned out to be pretty easy.

I made them, or at least, a half recipe, and I froze half of them.

Meanwhile, a few days earlier, I'd prepared my own recipe for carrot lox. I didn't have carrots as thick as would be ideal, but the oven was on anyway to roast something else, so I made a batch with my pitifully skinny (for this purpose) carrots.

And I knew I'd want more protein, and I wanted to use some fresh dill I had on hand, so I made a recipe from Tasty Thrifty Timely for a tofu-based cream cheese-type spread with dill. It had no cashews, which is unusual for a vegan cheese recipe, and I don't think it had the same cream cheese feel as if it had cashews, but it was good and went well with the carrot lox, so I went with it. I had prepped everything by the night before I planned to have a lovely breakfast of a homemade bagel with cream cheese and carrot lox, but...

That night, incidentally and ironically the same day I'd had my teeth cleaned and a dental exam, I was flossing my teeth, and broke a molar with the floss. I literally flossed off a chunk of my own tooth. I looked down in the sink in bewilderment, fished out the thing that had clinked into it, and looked in my mouth to discover that, yes, that was a tooth fragment.

This takes talent. I'm impressed, honestly, by the strange symbolism inherent in that. I didn't break a tooth on hard candy or anything. I broke my tooth while exercising good dental hygiene, something I do every night anyway. I broke my tooth right after a through dental exam saw no issues. After the pressures of cleaning and polishing my teeth didn't snap off any bits. Just, unceremoniously, bizarrely, a tooth decided it was done.

My dentist told me on the phone that it was probably because I've been clenching my teeth due to the stresses of the past few weeks. But also, she was then out of town and not going to be back for a while, so I had to find a new-to-me dentist to take an emergency visit to fix things. Fortunately, I got an appointment first thing the next morning with a very young dentist new to practicing in my town, who was super friendly and did a great job of reassuring me and fixing me up.

It was a relatively simple repair, and the new dentist agreed with my own dentist's theory, that the stresses of this month had essentially caused me to break my own tooth.

If nothing else was going to make me hate the state of the world, that certainly does it. As does the thought of the cheery young woman who took care of me that day having no hope of ever owning her own practice (she works for a huge corporate dental conglomerate) because it is unimaginable for her to ever be able to pay off her student loans in time to get a business loan and be able to pay that back. (She said she'd never heard of my dentist and was shocked, she said, that there was someone in town who had a single dentist practice, as that was such an expensive and daunting thing, and she had kind of given up on that dream for herself.) I will stick to my own, non-corporate dentist, because I don't like supporting big conglomerates when there are alternatives, but this whole mess is sad; we seem to all be disempowered these days. It shouldn't be this way. And it doesn't get me to unclench my jaw, really.

Anyway. I was not much in the mood for my fancy bagel after all that, but once the numbness wore off and the stress receded enough for me to be hungry, I finally made it. My everything-from-scratch bagel:

It tasted good, but it was hard to enjoy it. It's hard to enjoy a lot of things.

So let this be a cautionary tale: Don't stress so much about the state of the world that you crack your molars.

And, if you want a pretty cheap but fancy meal, and your teeth are intact, you can have homemade poppy seed bagels with homemade tofu cream cheese spread, carrot lox, onions, and capers. A homemade bagel will cost about 25 cents to make. Carrot lox will be about 50 cents per generous serving. The tofu spread will likely run you around another 25-50 cents per serving. Garnishes of red onion, capers, and dill will be negligible. So let's say you spend $2 making this bagel. A cream cheese and lox bagel in a local shop will be about $12, so you'll save a lot by making your own and making it vegan. But you'll enjoy them more if your teeth are intact, so I will reiterate: Don't clench your jaw in helpless rage; you'll only hurt yourself. Take out your rage in kneading the bagel dough instead.

Sigh. 

Let me know if you have ideas for the poppy seeds; I will continue to use them in things but I definitely don't have plans for them all yet.