If you don’t know what a “schmear” is–where the word comes from and why its etymology makes its application to bagels clear and unarguable–go HERE. And if you want to experience a bagel from the vantage point of an experienced bagel-eater, go HERE and HERE. As you can see, I’ve given the subject some thought, more thought even that I’ve given to pizza, which somewhat surprises me since I eat pizza more often. I think it’s because Little Caesar’s deep dish pepperoni is so greasily satisfying and Comfort Pizza is such a symphony to my palate that I don’t worry about not getting pizza that’s not like “real New York” pizza. Only Home Slice in Austin offers me that and, even then, they try to Austinize it, and it doesn’t always work.
That is not the case with bagels.
San Antonio’s Boss Bagels are decent, and these are what is served at PAX Coffee Shop downtown. (As an aside, and only Kerrvillians will get this, I like what appears to be a name alteration: from “PAX Coffee and Goods” to “PAX” or “PAX Coffee Shop.” The former made it sound more like a mercantile business, which it has never been. It has been and is a coffeeshop, and new owner Katie has trimmed off any excess nomenclature and made substantive changes to its interior, a couple that I like and a couple that I don’t, but all of which show PAX’s evolution into a pure coffeeshop. And that, I like.)
There are a couple bagel places in Austin that are good in my opinion — Rockstar Bagels and Wholy [sic] Bagels — but most of us have to rely on the closer Boss Bagels, whose one of two locations is beyond the TSA checkpoint at SAT. That’s actually quite smart of them; bad for us.
Rockstar Bagels, center right: “A transcendent bagel experience”?
It was time to make some Freeman bagels.
I decided to use THIS RECIPE, mainly because the writer claimed to be a “real New Yorker.” Anytime someone claims that, it is ballsy and requires other “real New Yorkers” to kick the tires. And in the end, it’s as arbitrary as finding a recipe for a good meatball written by someone who didn’t grow up in Italy or near Arthur Avenue in The Bronx. In the end, it’s all about taste and very little to nothing about the cook’s street creds. Those are useful only in marketing.
A few observations about the process:
I had never worked with yeast. I was told to use Active Dry Yeast and, after letting it sit in some warm water with sugar, I was told to stir it till it dissolved, which was a chore. My mistake was that the yeast-water-sugar mixture never bubbled. It may not have been ready to be stirred.
Kneading the dough for ten minutes was exercise! Because of the yeast (?), it was rubbery and bounced back, rather than being like biscuit dough, which has no yeast and calls for kneading only so much as necessary. Good grief! Bagel dough, and I assume all dough meant for bread products, gives you Popeye forearms and calls for a good shoulder massage afterward.
Dough didn’t rise to “twice its size.” It was maybe 125% of its size after resting for an hour. Probably not sitting in a warm enough spot.
Shaping the dough into bagels was both easy and hard. After dividing the dough into 8 separate pieces, getting the dough into round balls was difficult for me. The technique suggested in the recipe was unnecessarily confusing, and even the writer said it sounded more confusing than it was. Let’s just say that it wouldn’t have been so confusing if I’d watched the accompanying video which, like the men of the 1950s driving across the country with the family and not wanting to stop and ask for directions, I wasn’t about to do. Full steam ahead!
And speaking of “steam,” if you have ever eaten a steamed bagel, you know it’s more like eating a marshmallow with sesame seeds on top.
The space heater is on the higher of two settings and is about five feet away on the floor and exhaling — exhaling only — toward me under the desk. It is slightly unpleasant.
I stretch my neck and lean forward to look over my computer screen at it. Black, it’s shaped like a decapitated pyramid. If it was moving, its vent would be a hypnotic spiral.
It’s been raining this morning, so my normal ritual under the stars was abbreviated to a standoffish admiration from the back porch. To the left, watching our black cat consider its next steps. Listening to heavy drops hit something metallic at the house to my right. Not original drops; drops, rather, that had already fallen and were falling again from roof or gutter onto an aluminum surface of some kind.
How many times does a drop drop?
I’m in flannel pajama bottoms as I start to work, which was about an hour or more ago. My t-shirt is one that I wear every morning. I wash it occasionally. It and my other morning t-shirts are perfectly normal shirts — it’s not like they have profanity or naked ladies printed on them — but I wouldn’t wear them in public. It’d be like wearing underwear to shop for groceries.
And yet, I can work like this, at least for a little while. I can certainly write like this.
I could probably write while naked and maybe one day soon I will.
The Supergiant star Betelgeuse and a “titanic convulsion” in 2019, as recorded by Hubble observers.
Twice a day and both times in the dark, once at night before bed and again in the morning just after waking up, I walk out back to the 6th tee box on the golf course where we live and I admire the heavens in all their created glory. The temperature dropped to 30 degrees overnight, making the well-trimmed ryegrass feel like walking on a frozen crewcut.
At night I have my ritual of looking in particular for the constellation Orion and the surrounding stars and also for “nearby” Mars. (So odd that I would refer to these celestial bodies as if they sat on the circumference of a spherical boundary rather than existing on billions of concentric hyperbolic planes that constitute no barrier to travel.) Last night I found Betelgeuse and then, down and to the West, Sirius.
This morning I found the Big Dipper, and I remembered that it’s handle pointed toward some significant body. And indeed it did, to the quite bright Arcturus, which I looked up on Stellarium. That iPhone app also showed me that a Starlink satellite was passing overhead. Fricking cool.
This post might be boring to some, and now it constitutes a meta statement, which is also boring, even to me, but the experience itself is ineffable.
Gotta be honest with you, I was a bit put out. Now that I think about it, that’s a great phrase: being “put out.” Random 4-hours-sleep-last-night thought: raise your hand if you saw the Flintstones cartoons and remember how the cats were “put out” of the house at night.
“Some day, maybe Fred will win the fight… Then the cat will stay out for the night…”
Used to be that at night people put out the empty milk bottle and the cat. That’s just what you did. You can see for yourselves in this closing to one of my favorite cartoons that they’ve literally been doing this for 100,000 years. Sadly, the milkman, Bronto Burgers, driving on I-10 using only your feet for propulsion and putting the cat out at night have gone the way of the… (I think it’s worth noting that purple dinosaurs were around long before Barney.)
In my case, and to my seemingly irrevocable sorrow, I was put out by H-E-B.
Now, you have to understand something about H-E-B and my fanboy status around this national grocery store of Texas. (“We” Texans love H-E-B so much that there are Texas-shaped stickers printed with the common saying “Love my H-E-B.”) My quick rise to fanboy happened in 1996, and I won’t recount the story here but rather refer you to it HERE. Whether or not you read that post now or were one of the three who did so then, you should know that this site is inspired by H-E-B. For a New Yorker who grew up on real bagels, real pizza, and had smörgåsbord, sushi/sashimi and Ghanian by the time I could vote, I developed early on a prejudice toward not only food that wasn’t Gotham-found but also any grocery story that wasn’t called Fairway and didn’t require the skill of a Formula-1 driver to maneuver around the end caps and jockey for position at the express checkout line. If you have watched the Netflix series, Formula 1: Drive to Survive, you’ll know that cursing out the shopping cart driver who tries to overtake you is not unheard of. In fact, it’s encouraged.
You may not know this, but many Fairway shoppers themselves have sponsors ranging from Dave’s Killer Bread (this is indeed the Team Red Bull of grocery sponsors) to Post cereal to Le Colombe Coffee Nitro. At H-E-B, however, no sponsors are needed. No jockeying is needed. In fact, people are not even in a rush. Even the red scooter-basket-cart that people sit in go only as fast as a Chevy Suburban idling up Hilltop Drive.
I have veered so far off the subject.
Back to it.
I was put out.
Put out like a cat in the Mesozoic.
In addition to this site’s being inspired by H-E-B, I consistently post on my Instagram the items I buy from the store and cook. I also get responses from the store in Instagram DMs about my feed and stories that mention them. I am such a devotee that their coffee brand Cafe Olé is practically the only brand I drink. (We also occasionally drink Aldo’s Coffee from Greenport, New York, and Cuvee coffee I got at PAX here in town, but basically it’s all Cafe Olé.)
So I thought I’d try to become an “ambassador” for the brand and get free coffee for posting various kinds of H-E-B products. (Let’s be real, Red Bull-sponsored F-1 driver Max Verstappen drinks that swill publicly, but he probably eschews it privately. I, on the other hand, would drink Cafe Olé no matter what. Or would I…?)
I DM’ed H-E-B on Instagram, and they gave me the email address to write to in order to ask about becoming a brand ambassador. So I did.
Crickets.
Four times. Crickets. Not even an auto-reply.
So I complained, like a little pissy New Yorker who doesn’t get his way grocery shopping:
Gary Gulman with a riff about Trader Joe’s, that bastion of yoga-panted and entitled midday-shopping white women.
H-E-B’s Instagram monitor(s) have consistently responded to my questions and proactively commented on my posts and stories. It was obvious that if I wanted a response to my selfless (“yeah…no”) offer to be an ambassador, I’d have to ping the IG crew rather than wait for responses to my emails.
So I did.
And like a pissy New Yorker who thinks that grocery stores revolve around me — although they kind of do: me and every other customer. Ok… low blow. But pissy nonetheless, like I said — I even called the lack of a response to my emails, “rude.”
I said that. I know: harsh language.
You can imagine what I’d say to a New York City-based grocery store. In fact, you wouldn’t have to imagine it. I could show you how I responded to Gristedes one time if only I could find the post from my old blog.
H-E-B wrote back.
They wrote back and promised a follow up. And you know what? They followed up, because later THAT DAY, a woman named Shannyn wrote a very kind email and said that H-E-B didn’t have any ambassadors for the Cafe Olé brand. Shame, if you ask me. BUT, she added:
While we don’t have an official Café Ole ambassador program, we appreciate the love and really are glad you love brewing Café Ole!
We’d love to send you some Café Ole to say thanks- and if you post anything, wonderful — but if not, just know we appreciate you being such a fan!
Gracious H-E-B response to pissy New York complainant
Yesterday a box arrived. A heavy Box. From H-E-B with, I soon learned, a packing slip with Shannyn’s name on it.
In it were eight (8) pounds of flavored ground coffee, a 2lb bag of flavored coffee beans and various swag, including a “Love my H-E-B” sticker, which was quickly affixed to my otherwise pristine MacBook Air. Market value was easily more than $100.
I think I’ve found a way to spot Mars in the night sky using Orion’s belt and then two stars.
We live on the fringe of a golf course, and the 6th tee is about thirty yards from our back door. Twice a day I walk out onto the tee box. At night, I stand there and take in the majesty — and I do mean majesty: a word we rarely use other than referring to Charles or Elizabeth and which we ought never use when speaking about individual humans in a hierarchical way but, instead, use universally about the majesty of our humanity and the Created Order around us — I take in the majesty of creation. When the stars are out, not only is it more pretty of course than on a cloudy night. It also is more humbling to me by far than standing in daylight. In daylight, I often feel massaged by Sun as that star lovingly warms what is around me. It lulls me to think that somehow I’m at the center. Night reminds me I’m not. And a starry night is a fearsome thing indeed.
Then in the morning — before coffee, before writing in my journal, before any sacred text reading, and certainly before social media and email — I walk out onto that same tee box and again I take in the majesty and also face my irrational fear of being alone outside at night.
Finding Mars is relatively easy now compared with remembering some of the star names.
In “Orion’s Belt” are, from “east to west” (for lack of a better way to describe their positions), Alnitak Alnilam and Mintaka. I just checked that link and, sure enough, NASA describes their relative position the same way (“east to west”). They are “blue supergiant” suns, more massive and powerful than ours. (That kind of makes one feel almost quaint, yes? To talk about “our sun” when so many other suns out there aren’t possessed at all. Most likely.) All three names are derived from Arabic words, and this makes me think of the three wise men and Zoroastrianism, which was an association bandied about when I was growing up in the 1960s and ’70s and before anyone speaking Arabic was considered a terrorist. It was also a time when much of popular Christianity could tolerate a non-Jewish “-ism” to be included in the Nativity story.
Alnitak — from an nitaq, “the girdle.”
Alnilam — from al Nitham or al Nathm, “the string of pearls.”
Mintaka — from al Mintakah, “the belt.”
If I follow these stars from east to west I plot a course further to the west and then north until I find Bellatrix. “Bellatrix” means “female warrior,” and is likely derived from one of two words, both male nouns. Webster’s Dictionary says that “-trix” is a suffix that, when added to words, “forms a feminine noun of agency.” One thinks of “executrix” of an estate (vs. an executor). (The reddit generation has taken “dominatrix” and shortened it to “dom.” Much of language amongst them is abbreviated or even acronym’ed, made easy for texting. In fact, you can turn this entire post into a 572-letter acronym and text it to a friend. They will thank you. Try it.)
Yet being an “executrix,” ladies, is your nom (de guerre…see how I did that?) in only some states. Other states will make the person who executes a Last Will and Testament the “executor” and, effectively, rob women of their agency in such matters. Gender-fluidity — a liquidation of gender from noun to adjective — also robs the identifying person of their definition in the literal sense. I would think their desire would be the opposite. Of course, fluidity does allow one the freedom to sit at the head of the Thanksgiving table one year and at the kids’ table the next.
On the contrary, I like to think of words as ice crystals, branching off from a center and forming a pattern that can be traced back when looking exceedingly closely and with care not to melt their ancestral paths.
For more on this increasingly dull (to some) topic, go HERE. I, for one, hold my breath when searching for the root. One never knows what one will find. It is often a root word meaning something not so much male-dominated as true to its actual meaning, one which we shy from today for fear of losing friends or social media followers, which is to say the same thing. “Gentleman” comes to mind. It used to mean an Englishman of noble birth who owned land. Then it meant a man who was not only polite but polite specifically to women who wanted men to be polite. Then it meant a man who was polite to women who wanted men to be polite to women but not let anyone else know that she wanted that. Today, of course, it refers to a man who walks into an building with no windows at lunchtime carrying a hundred dollars in singles.
From Bellatrix, I fly across the north and veer slightly south until I hit Aldebaran. Yet another word that might be derived through Arabic and originally from the Latin. For more: HERE.
Finally, to Mars, I simply float a little northeast (?). At this point I have lost my sense of direction, because we use direction on a horizontal plane that is not easily tilted. Let me describe it this way: if last night I stood on that tee box facing toward Medina, Texas — which is an ironic posture for an Episcopalian to take when working with Arabic names — and look up, I see Orion’s Belt in the southwest at about 11 o’clock. (Which means, as you now know, that when I tell you in Kerrville, “let’s meet tomorrow at 1 o’clock,” what I am really saying is “let’s have an early breakfast in San Antonio.”)
I follow Bellatrix and Aldebaran by leaning back, and by the time I hit Mars, I’m pretty much looking straight up. Lunchtime in Kerrville. In the end, what we think of as “north” (and south and east and west) is still a self-centered orientation of the universe. It is “around” us. We are not “in it.” Copernicus is rolling in his grave.
This, of course, is one of the main reasons I go outside under the stars — quite alone at night and very alone first thing in the morning. I want to feel “in it” rather than it being “around me,” as I do in daytime. Lulled. (Included in the many etymologies of “lull” and its offspring “lullaby” is the Dutch word “lullen,” which means “to talk nonsense.”)
Instead of being lulled to sleep, I want to feel that irrational fear of being in the dark.
Henry Beston (1888-1968) wrote:
Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than night. Primitive folk, gathered at a cave mouth round a fire, do not fear night; they fear, rather, the energies and creatures to whom night gives power; we of the age of the machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it.
For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars — pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across eternal seas of space and time.
At night, or in early morning, I have nothing to fear except deer, a skunk, maybe a possum, or a stray cat. Yet the hairs on the back of my neck and on my arms actually do stand up. It is irrational. I am never in any danger. Ever. So I walk out there to the tee box to glory in the majesty of the deep navy blue sky and to face down that irrational fear, which is not a fear of anything external so much as it is a fear of what I might learn if I stand still for that one moment of night.
