Alright, week two!

Hope you’re doing well.

Still figuring everything out to be honest with you. There’s A LOT about setting up a newsletter I hadn’t considered, all sorts of boring stuff like banner images (not sorted yet!), logos (not sorted yet!) and social media (have a guess…)

I’m excited to get into it this week, the feature discusses one of my favourite things, the Bagel.

There’s also news from around the region and a nice tele recommendation for you to finish.

See you on the other side!

I love a bagel.

I’m talking a real bagel, not one of those soft depressing imitations of a bagel you get from a supermarket that, to heavily paraphrase the Arctic Monkeys, we’re meant to believe were made in New York City when they were made in Rotherham⁴.

A real bagel; crisp on the outside that opens up into a dense chewy bread that you smother in cream cheese or load with breakfast goodies. You don’t toast it! God no! It’s already the perfect texture inside and if you bake your own or are lucky enough to visit a good bagel shop they’re fresh baked and warm already.

This summer I was in New York for five nights and ate 3 bagels while I was there¹.

Before I’d ever been to New York I’ve been trying to learn the secrets of good bagel making² and that week in the Big Apple was a re-affirmation that bagels are bloody lovely things worth taking the time to perfect.

So imagine my curiosity when a new bagel shop opened at Meadowhall shopping centre in Sheffield, just up the road.

Surely, I thought, in this day and age there’s no way a chain of convenience food stores could have risen to such prominence to have locations across the UK without a quality product.

This is the era of street food, we’re literally over flowing with great food so much so that we’ve had to fit out giant warehouses to fill with all manner of street food vendors peddling wares from around the globe.

And it was with that enthusiasm that I visited Bagel Factory³ in Meadowhall. The enthusiasm soon died.

I knew I wasn’t on to a winner as soon as I walked in. The thin, looking bagels on display were troubling, and the lack of an everything bagel was sacrilege. But maybe I was being too harsh, this was after all a UK chain, they perhaps had reduced the number of bagel types to suit the UK market where your average person on the street wouldn’t even know what an everything bagel was. Have an open mind, I told myself.

I ordered a poppy seed bagel with cream cheese, there was only plain cream cheese but again I pushed this aside as my being overly picky. I couldn’t possibly expect a UK store to stock the same stuff as a New York one.

Then they toasted the bagel without my asking and I knew. Whatever I was about to get it wouldn’t be in the same league as a real New York bagel, it wasn’t even playing the same sport. It wasn’t even going to better the bagels I make at home.

It cost me like £4 so I won’t call it a waste of money. It was worth the £4 just for the curiosity that I’d always feel had I not given it a try. But it was not good.

Just buy a supermarket bagel and toast it yourself when you get home, apply Philadelphia liberally. There, I’ve saved you having to try it, you’ll probably get a better result and you’ll get six for the price of this one.

If you like a supermarket bagel and you’re out and about and absolutely need to get that fix this place will hit that spot for you. But a thin, toasted, supermarket adjacent bagel with a cream cheese that I found personally had an odd taste was just not what I hoped for. I didn’t finish it.

Is the UK so hopelessly adrift at making bagels that this place could pass? Not only pass but succeed? They’ve got over 30 locations! In some of this country’s largest cities! Have we got such little respect for the humble bagel that we’d tolerate, nay, embrace this?

Come on Britain. Sort yourself out.

That part of the meal you don’t know if you really want but someone ordered it so here it is!

Last week I spoke to you briefly about affiliate links and sponsorships and that all still applies.

This week I wanted to talk about “A.I.”.

I’m not a fan to be frank. If you search “How to start a newsletter?” there’ll be literally dozens of people trying to sell you an online course and almost all of them will tell you that you can support the production of your content using “A.I.”.

Why do I keep quoting “A.I.”? It’s because I refuse to call these things “intelligent”. Ask ChatGPT what 233 multiplied by 444 is. Go ahead I’ll wait. Still confident in its intelligence when it can’t accomplish what a calculator can?

Not only that but all these “A.I.”-‘s are actually doing is a web search that returns more words. They amalgamate stuff they find that’s already been written on a topic into a cohesive blob of vanilla text.

It sounds pretentious but I consider the written word an artistic expression, even when it’s waffling on about a low calibre bagel shop in a shopping centre.

As such I won’t ever be using “A.I.” to generate my content. Everything you see before you is written by an early 30’s bearded man and don’t ever forget it!

As such it takes me a great deal of time and effort to produce every one of these so if I could be cheeky for one moment; if, just for example, you wanted to buy a new air fryer clicking here and buying one wouldn’t hurt. (That does look to be a cracking air fryer to be fair.)

We’ve recently been watching Ludwig on BBC. It’s pretty good fun if you’re into murder mysteries. David Mitchell plays a neurotic puzzle solver forced into being a detective to find his missing brother with a cast that includes Anna Maxwell Martin and Sophie WIllan.

It’s on BBC iPlayer and it’s definitely worth a watch. Kind of if Mark Corrigan from Peep Show was a detective but rated PG. Haven’t got to the end though so can’t speak to how it wraps everything up. Anybody watching anything good lately?

I’m facing the interesting position next week of having nothing planned to review and very little time to fit something in so we’ll see how that goes.

You might get a feature on what I had for my tea on a weeknight… I don’t know. Anyway, again if you’ve read this you’re one of a select few and I appreciate you. Hopefully you enjoyed it.

See you next time.

Chris