Oak smoked tomato and pepper bagels

The VegHog's Tomato Festival continues and here is a quite different tomato idea to yesterday's pasta bolognese. I made some oak smoked tomato and pepper bagels, which were extremely tasty but also quick to make. Tomatoes are a brilliant ingredient for different breakfast variations and I quite often find myself using tomatoes on breakfast breads or omelettes. These hearty and smoky bagels would prepare you well for any day. I combined fresh and oak smoked tomatoes in these. If you can't get a hold of oak smoked tomatoes, substitute them with sundried tomatoes.

Here's how I made these bagels:

Ingredients

½ red onion

1 romano pepper

Olive oil

Few oak smoked tomatoes

Few mini plum tomatoes

Birch smoked salt

Ground black pepper

100 g Havarti cheese

Fresh basil

Lamb's lettuce

4 sesame bagels

Method

Cut the red onion and romano pepper into half rings and fry them briefly in oil in a pan.

Cut the bagels in half and put the onions, peppers, oak smoked tomatoes and mini plum tomatoes on them and season with salt and pepper.

Add the cheese and bake in the oven for about 10 minutes until the cheese has melted.

Serve with fresh basil and lamb's lettuce.

Enjoy as breakfast or lunch or even evening snack.

Your VegHog

Cheese and onion bagels

Good morning! It's always morning somewhere, isn't it. Here's what I had for breakfast today: a cheese, onion, tomato and rocket bagel. The tomatoes came fresh from my garden and many other components were just basically leftovers that I had bought for other dishes, and I had to get rid of them. This was a very good breakfast indeed, I don't have to have lunch for a while.

These are the ingredients I used:

Plain bagels

Tomatoes

Red onion

Salad onion

Emmental

Sussex Charmer cheese

Fresh rocket

Salt

Pepper

I halved the bagels and baked them at 180C for about 10 minutes with the red onion rings, tomato slices, salt, pepper and cheeses on them. Then I just added some fresh salad onion rings and rocket and put the halves back together.

I always need my morning coffee, and today I had it from a lovely Moomin mug.

Have a good day everyone!

Your VegHog

Carrot bagels

I'm back home and to my own kitchen. It's a bit easier cooking here as I know where everything is and know about the oven temperatures etc. It was very good being on a small holiday back in Finland though and I returned with a suitcase full of Finnish food and drinks, some of which you will surely see here in my blog. And people outside of Finland, remember that most of these classics can be purchased online, if something catches your eye. So, now to today's  easy breakfast recipe.

Quite often I bake carrot rolls, but this was my first time making carrot bagels. To be fair, the middle holes closed during the baking almost fully, so are these rolls after all? Anyway, it's the thought that counts, and smaller holes make the bagels easier to fill, right? If you've never tried carrot rolls or carrot bread, I would really encourage you to do so. Carrot adds a lovely little flavour and colour to baked goods.

I found this recipe on the good pages of Valio rated as easy to make and a good baking idea to make with kids (only in Finnish again). They made 20 small bagels with this recipe, but I got 14 somewhat larger ones as the end result.

Here are the ingredients and instructions.

250 ml milk

½ tsp salt

1 tbsp sugar

2 tbsp dry yeast

1 carrot

550 ml wheat flour

50 ml melted butter

Grate the carrot finely with a cheese grater. Warm the milk lukewarm and mix in the salt, sugar and dry yeast.

Add the grated carrot to the dough. Then also add the flour and butter. Mix into a soft dough. Let it rise for about 40 minutes.

Divide the dough into small sections and shape rolls from it. Let the round rolls rise on a baking tray under a teatowel for further 15 minutes.

Make a 3cm wide hole in the middle of the rolls by stretching the dough.

Bake at 225C for about 12 minutes and serve with butter, cheese, tomato, cucumber or whatever you may desire.

Your VegHog