(Self-) Isolated Foodie: The Bagel Edition

It's been a mighty long time since I blogged. Life got busy. But like much of the rest of the country and the world, I'm now working from home with a lot fewer obligations from day to day and a need to fill my time!

So some quick updates:

• Baby Girl is now a TeenGirl! How did that happen??
• We did indeed move away from Rain City, but we moved back! TeenGirl and I spent less than a year away. Husband had to work a year before he could come back to his old job.
• Rain City has been good to us. We feel pretty comfy here.

With all this self-isolation, I've been doing some extra cooking and baking, and given the name of my blog, I felt almost obligated to start blogging again.

My personal goal during however many weeks our lives are on partial hold is to perfect my bagel technique. Living in the rural west, I don't have a lot of options to purchase good bagels, so I've made them a few times. They've always been fine, but I want GREAT.

So I started last week with Trial #1:

I used this recipe from the Sophisticated Gourmet as my starting point. They're described as New York style bagels, which is what I'm after.

The only change I made in the recipe was to divide the dough into nine pieces instead of eight, because there are three of us. I didn't want us to fight over bagels. Each of us got one plain, one with sesame seeds, and one with Trader Joe's Everything But the Bagel seasoning mix. I supplied the bagels!

As you can see, they look more or less like bagels! They tasted like bagels. They chewed like bagels. I was pretty happy with them. My biggest issue was with the shaping of them, which is where my quest lies. I want tasty, chewy bagels that are also pretty and somewhat uniform. For my first effort in years, I'm happy with Trial #1. But I'm under shelter-in-place rules for another four weeks (and maybe more). I hope to do better than somewhat uniform by the end.

Are you stress-baking? Or cooking? What's on your list?