New Food/Cooking Adventures

This weekend I had two new cooking adventures: 

1.) I made bagels from scratch with friends.

2.) I canned salsa (without my mom or Grandma supervising) with a friend.  

Both cooking adventures came out surprisingly well, especially since I do not consider myself to be an amazing cook and definitely NOT a baker....I have one to many baking horror stories.

The bagels were the perfect texture. Chewy and soft on the inside and crunchy on the outside with the black sesame seeds for a little extra crunch, decoration, and flavor. We ate them hot out of the oven with Vegan tofu-cream-cheese-like spread and they were delicious.  Only took an hour 1/2 with the use of my friend Alison's bread machine, a pot of boiling water, and my friend Maurine's oven. 

The salsa was chunky and runny and just the perfect blend of spices that leaves a little bit of heat but not too much.....Mrs. Wages makes the best Salsa mix ever!!!!!  

Has always and will always be my favorite salsa!  

  Only 7 quart jars would fit into the canner so two "special" jars were labeled 'EAT ME' since the jars weren't canned or sealed.  

Salsa is fun to make also.  We used canned tomatoes from Costco since tomatoes here didn't have a good season and were expensive while 6lb cans of whole tomatoes from Costco were super cheap.  The best and most messy part of making salsa is squishing and/or cutting up the whole, skinned tomatoes.  By the end of the process I had tomatoes all over the place.  Poor Michelle, her kitchen looked like a crime scene with tomato juice and guts squished everywhere. At least the end result was worth the mess!

Since the topic of the day is food....on a stranger note.  

I recently went out for dinner with a friend who ordered for dessert, cinnamon-sugar doughnut bites with a white-frosting glaze.  

This is what the service platter looked like when it was brought to our table. 

The doughnut bites were very oddly shaped. 

I am assuming that they squeezed them from a pastry bag into the oil to fry them.

This week is crazy busy and I feel like I have no interaction with the outside world...and it's only Wednesday.

If your week is equally crazy or you have a new food adventure or strange food sighting let me know...I could use the entertainment.
Thanks.