From the Homefront: Bagels and Garden Booty

I don't know why I put off trying bagels again for so long. Last time, I tried making a batch from a recipe that I found on the internet and they tasted good but were a disaster in every other sense. This time, they were damn near perfect, becasue I went straight to the god of bread-making: Peter Reinhart. I bought the The Bread Baker's Apprentice a while ago after hearing rave reviews about it everywhere. Boy, they weren't lying. These bagels turned out crispish on the outside and soft and chewy on the inside. Seriously, I would give up my first-born for these bagels (Sorry Aspen!), but, instead, she's going to help me make more while she's visiting so she can take some home to the fam.
I think I may have mentioned before that I have the same thing for breakfast every morning. Due to the gestational diabetes, I had to give up my morning bagel, but now that I've cooked these babies up, I'm back at it. Indeed, not only are the bagels homemade, but the toppings are now straight from our garden making for an almost entirely homemade breakfast (I leave the cream cheese up to the good folks at Toffutti). Due to an abnormally wet summer, our garden has been producing like crazy. I'm a bit surprised, given that I have a black thumb, but I also admittedly have very little to do with the garden. I decided I wanted one and picked out the seedlings, but Josh has done most of the work building the beds, watering, and picking the produce. I supervise from the window and stick my head out occasionally to water the basil in the pot right next to the back door. Why, you ask?

Motherfucking snakes in our motherfucking garden.

Every time I stick more than my head out the door, some snake goes sliding by underfoot. Don't get me wrong, I know that these little garden snakes are harmless and are actually good for the garden, but that doesn't stop those sneaky little fuckers from making sudden movements that inevitably make me shriek like a little girl, drop the baby, and run (ok, I'm being a bit hyperbolic but I do indeed shriek...even when there's really no snake and Josh just thinks it's funny to point and say "watch out for that snake!").

But, my supervisory position is paying off. We have more zucchini than we can use (almost), the tomatoes are starting to ripen in hordes, and we finally got the prize of all prizes: the lemon cucumber. For a while, we though our various types of squash go frisky with one another and produced some kind of mutant offspring, but no...These little yellow balls of sunshine are delicious, taste nothing like lemon, and make me very happy.
Ah, but I digress. The breakfast of breakfasts. The thing that makes getting out of a bed a little bit less painful in the morning. The lovely snack that also ends up being second breakfast on most days...:
A homemade jalapeno bagel with vegan cream cheese, fresh ground salt and pepper, and homegrown lemon cucumber, tomato, and basil. Yum. Yum.