Wild Yeast

Cutting a bagel is dangerous business. According to the Wall Street Journal, in 2008 there were 1,979 bagel-related emergency room visits. This makes bagels the fifth most dangerous food (behind chicken, potatoes, apples, and onions). If you’re partial to your fingers, I suggest a bagel-cutting aid.

I’ve used a guillotine-style bagel cutter for a long time, but sometimes it doesn’t give the cleanest cut. A serrated knife does a better job, but the risk of accidents is high, especially when your bagel is the right kind (that is, shiny-slippery-firm, not squishy-soft-pudgy). The good people at BigKitchen sent me this Ironwood Acacia Bagel Miter, and I was anxious to see if it would cut it.

Read on for my opinion, and a giveaway

The Green Market Baking Book : 100 Delicious Recipes for Naturally Sweet & Savory Treats by Laura C. Martin is premised on the idea that baking with fresh, seasonal ingredients, and without refined sugar, is better for both our bodies and our planet. If you like that idea, you’ll like this book.

The majority of the recipes are treats of the sweet variety (cakes, pies, cookies, puddings, muffins, etc.). All are made with one or more “natural sweeteners” such as honey, maple syrup, brown rice syrup, and barley malt syrup. The book includes a section on substituting these ingredients for refined sugar in your own recipes. Whether or not you believe (and I’m not sure I do) Martin’s assertion that these sweeteners are more healthful than sugar, you may still wish to “support the small producers of alternative sweeteners — the honeybee keepers, the maple syrup farmers, and so on.”

The recipes — some Martin’s own, but many contributed by bakers and chefs around the country — are grouped by season, and most, though not all, feature fresh produce. Some are designated as low-fat, gluten-free, or dairy-free, and many contain a good proportion of whole grain flours and/or heart-healthier fats such as olive oil.

For me, though, what any baking book that focuses primarily on desserts comes down to is not whether the recipes are healthful, because I’m not going to go looking to dessert to fill my nutritional dance card. What it comes down to is do the recipes work, and do they taste good? The answer here, as far as I can tell, is yes they do (mostly).

Continue reading for recipe and book giveaway…

For a cute song, and a giveaway of a cool shirt, read more!
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I’m going to make this short and sweet. These are my flaxseed grissini:

Because flaxseeds are good for your brain, the recipe got to appear in this cookbook:

You can also find the recipe here.

You can enter to win a copy of the book, thereby getting all 50 brainy and beautiful recipes from 50 brainy and beautiful bloggers, by leaving a comment below.

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I get a lot of emails asking me to spend my money, but rarely do I get one asking me to spend someone else’s money. So when BlogHer and HomeGoods offered a $50 card for me to spend on gifts, they didn’t have to ask twice. And letting me give away a second $50 gift card to one of you made the deal even better.

Find out what I bought, and how you can enter to win.

I love these things.

Not the flours, grains, and seeds (seen here dragged from their beds so I could assess which ones are fit to make the 6-mile move to my new home next week), although I do love them too. But I’m talking about the colorful bars that clip the bags closed.

If you don’t already know about these little hinged pieces of plastic, your life is about to be changed forever. Okay, maybe they’re not life-changing in the same way as, say, a credit card and Velcro are, but still. Not having to grapple with knots, twist-ties, rubber bands, tape, or springs is huge. I can clip these one-piece guys on and snap them off again with one hand tied behind my back, and when they’re on they stay put.

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