How To Burn Your Tastebuds off in Four Easy Steps (Vegan MoFo 2013)

This might seem silly, but it's serious.  A bagel with cream cheese and hot peppers is one of my favorite non-syrup breakfasts. 

1. Start off with the freshest bagel you can get your hands on.  Extra credit if it's a jalapeno bagel.
2. Cut in half and vegan cream-cheese both sides.

3. Gather all of the hot peppers you can find.  In my case, my dad grew a particularly hot assortment this summer, then periodically picked and delivered them to my door.

CAREFULLY wash and chop the hot peppers, then assemble them on one side of your cream-cheesed bagel.  The goal is to use only utensils and not your fingers, which will surely find their way into your eyeballs otherwise.

Only de-seed if you're a total wuss.

Remember that you should have cream-cheesed both sides of your bagel in order to form total suction to hold your peppers in. 

4. Sandwich, and cut in half.

Prepare to have your tastebuds burned off (yes, that's a habanero); keep a large glass of chilled OJ handy.

not for dogs!

I suppose if you didn't want your breakfast to be an endurance event you could always just use not-as-hot jalapeno peppers only.  To each his own.

Soft-Pretzel Attempt

I haven't been to Sigmund's yet (nothing that close to Lula's has a chance) and I found myself with some roasted habanero mustard from Kalustyan's that was about to expire.  Instead of eating my weight in tofu pups (which I could do), I decided to try and make my own soft pretzels.  The recipe seemed easy enough, but it was all new to me and nothing seemed right.  My yeast mixture didn't foam and my dough didn't rise.  I got some Twitter suggestions from the genuis GonePie (who I'm convinced can cook anything perfectly) and hoped for the best; this is what I wound up with.

They were certainly edible, but didn't have much of a pretzel flavor and were just too doughy for my taste.  Couple that with the fact that all of the coarse sea salt in the house had been used up on edamame and you can see that I wasn't really batting 1,000.  Oh yeah, and I totally get that they don't look much like pretzels either, so no need to point that out specifically to ridicule me (just chuckle to yourselves).  It turns out that those Auntie Anne's peeps have some kind of PhD in pretzel knotting, along with being able to waft the smell of cinnamon sugar throughout every nook & cranny of the mall.