Does your city have an independent donut chain? Seattle does: Top Pot Doughnuts. They offer a couple dozen varieties and are sold throughout their chain of coffee shops (which are masterpieces of retro-hip design) and at plenty of other places in town.

I’ve grown pretty annoyed with Top Pot. Their prices have more than doubled since they opened in 2002, and now all glazed and filled donuts are $1.69. I’m certainly not averse to paying that much for a pastry, but it had better be special. The trouble is, the last couple of times I’ve gotten a Top Pot donut, it has been fried in insufficiently hot oil–the unmistakable symptoms are a soggy crust and greasy interior.

But I know how Top Pot can regain my trust. They can start making donut holes. Donut holes are always better than donuts. Everybody knows this. You can eat a bunch of different kinds without getting sick, and you can throw them at ornery coworkers.

On our recent Vancouver trip, Iris got a little grumpy after lunch one day, and the solution appeared before us like a sign from the Canadian version of God (aka Geddy Lee): Timbits. Timbits are the donut holes at Tim Hortons, and they come in no less than a dozen flavors, the best of which is sour cream. Since I don’t work in an office, feeding Timbits to Iris is the closest I get to throwing donut holes at ornery coworkers.

Anyway, Top Pot needs to roll out the donut holes ASAP. And I expect fanfare!

I make my own bagels. Not very often, but as far as I know there’s only one place in Seattle that makes a decent bagel (Bagel Oasis), and it’s too far from my house.

The two problems with Seattle bagels, just like bagels everywhere (even New York), are size and steam. Most bagels are too big, which makes them less fun to eat, just like one giant potsticker would be lame compared to a plate of regular dumplings. And to cut corners, many bagel outfits steam their bagels instead of boiling, resulting in a bagel with lousy crust.

Luckily, homemade bagels are quite easy. You can make them in the evening, let them ferment overnight in the fridge, then boil and bake them in the morning. I made bagels a few days ago (Iris helped) from the Montreal bagel recipe in Alford and Duguid’s book Home Baking. It’s becoming conventional wisdom that the world’s best bagels come from Montreal; Hillel Cooperman discusses the greatness of Canadian bagels at Tastingmenu.com. He also gives his recipe, which looks pretty tasty.

In any case, when you make bagels at home, you can make them small, and you will boil them, and they will be good. We made ours really small (about an ounce each) and put sesame seeds on them. If you’re nervous about working with dough, know that bagels are made with very dry dough, which means it won’t stick to everything or burble away across the counter like ciabatta dough. Bagels also freeze well. I defrosted the remaining bagels this morning and somehow they were even better than the day I made them. Maybe I’m just getting my appetite back.

There are two weird ingredients you need for making bagels. Bagels are best made with high-gluten flour, the highest protein flour you can buy. And they contain malt, either in the form of malt powder or malt syrup. Malted milk powder will not work. Malt syrup (usually barley, sometimes wheat) can be found at most health food stores. Malt powder (sometimes labeled “diastatic” or “nondiastatic”–the difference is irrelevant for bagel making) and high-gluten flour are available from [King Arthur](http://www.bakerscatalogue.com). Their high-gluten flour is called Sir Lancelot. I reordered recently and our flour is still in its bag, which means somewhere around the house is a Rubbermaid container that says “Sir Lancelot” on it.

Do you have Sir Lancelot in a Rubbermaid container?

In this era of increasing availability of gourmet goods, I’m finding it harder than ever to get my hands on a good burger.

Our local outpost of Kidd Valley is closing next week. Kidd Valley is a long-running Seattle chain (a dozen locations) with a predictable 50s soundtrack and decent fast-food burgers. They used to have a logo featuring a young girl in an absurdly revealing pose. Note also the shoes. Eventually someone realized this logo was more pornographic than actual porn and changed it to this.

Maybe the reason I’m so often disappointed by burgers is that there are three (admittedly indistinct) categories of burgers, and you have to figure out what you’re dealing with before you cast judgment.

* Kidd Valley is an example of the fast food burger (FFB), the lowest end of the spectrum. The Kidd gets props for decent-tasting beef and for offering real grilled onions. The top of this genre is In-N-Out Burger, which pretty much gets everything right. In Oregon, Burgerville is great.

* Next is the burger-with-aspirations (BWA) category. It’s not a fancy burger, but it doesn’t want to be associated with fast food, either. Think Red Robin for a pedestrian example. In Seattle, the undisputed heavyweight champion in this category is Red Mill Burgers. Red Mill has a pile of bacon that is much larger than Iris. They offer varieties like the Verde, with grilled anaheim chiles, and my favorite, the Red Onion Jam burger, with lots of caramelized onions. Many people call Red Mill the best in town, but I’m a little snobbier than that, as you’ll see. (You could also argue that Red Mill belongs in the FFB category, but when anaheim chiles get involved, it’s no longer fast food to me.) There is a doomed restaurant space down the street from me that currently houses a Polish barbecue place that puts out bad vibes but was previously an Irish pub that served a fantastic burger of this type. It may be possible to get a BWA served medium-rare, something that will never happen with a FFB. The best BWA I’ve had in Seattle is at Geraldine’s Counter, in Columbia City.

* Finally you have the gourmet burger. Here’s where you start to hear about the house-made bun, the 100 percent organic ground chuck, and so on. Daniel Boulud’s db Burger, stuffed with foie gras and short ribs (get it with double the truffles for only $120), falls into this category, but so does the $13.75 burger at Union Square Cafe and my favorite burger in Seattle, the $12 Palace Burger at Tom Douglas’s [Palace Kitchen](http://www.tomdouglas.com/palace/). The Palace Burger is an awesome thing. I’ve never had it arrive anything other than perfectly medium-rare, nicely salted, and accompanied by a delightful condiment rack featuring pickled green tomatoes. The fries are also good. The Palace is only open for dinner, or I would probably accidentally wander in there at lunchtime way too often.

None of this is groundbreaking analysis, I know. But tonight, while we were eating at Kidd Valley after Iris’s checkup (she’s tip-top), something occurred to me. There’s this bar down the street from us, The Deluxe, where I’ve been avoiding the burgers for a while, partly because they were always changing the bun and the fries, and partly because the patties were always perfectly round and I prefer a hand-formed patty, for no reason that I can verbalize. Anyway, what I realized was: if they had served me a Deluxe burger at Kidd Valley, I would have been dancing on the table with glee, to the tune of that great 50s hit by Tommy Peacock and his Shurlettes, or something. In other words, unless there’s something quite wrong with it, a burger can only disappoint within its category.

The corollary is: if you served a db Burger to an unsuspecting kid at McDonald’s, he would puke.

A few years ago I was watching the NBA finals, and Michael Jordan was playing. As the game got underway, the announcer said he’d just been informed that Jordan had been experiencing flu-like symptoms, and perhaps we should not expect him to perform up to his usual standard. Of course, Jordan went on to score like 175 points, and the announcer kept saying, “Look at that shot! And with flu-like symptoms!”

My point here is that last night I developed flu-like symptoms, so I am lying in bed not feeling like eating anything. I just had a piece of plain Texas Toast. I’ll know I’m getting better when I start to crave peperonata. Last night I was up half the night with a fever dream that, among other things, involved someone complaining, “You got tzatziki on my dashiki!”

I picked up Ken Haedrich’s book Pie from the library, and I flopped it open to a random page, trying to take my mind off my various aches and pains. On the page was a sidebar about National Pie Day, created by the American Pie Council. And wouldn’t you know it, it’s today, and I’m in no condition to eat pie. What other sorts of baked-good councils do you think there are?

> The APC services two special groups…pie loving consumers and pie-related business professionals.

If I were an undercover CIA operative, I would answer questions about my line of work by saying mysteriously, “Let’s just say I’m a pie-related business professional.”

So I forced myself to celebrate NPD by eating a couple of leftover cookies that Laurie made from the book The Weekend Baker by Abigail Johnson Dodge. They’re bar cookies with a brownie layer on the bottom and a chocolate chip cookie layer on the top. It sounds like a gimmick, but they’re delicious and not hard to make, and the book endeared itself to us by giving ingredients by weight. I’ve thought about writing a polemic about weighing ingredients, but a guy I know already wrote one, The Kitchen Scale Manifesto, and it’s much more thorough than what I would have come up with.

I think I may have solved the adult bib problem. Laurie got me a Salumi apron for Christmas. It’s black, with Salumi’s great pig logo on the front. I’ve been wearing it in the kitchen, and then when it’s time to sit down for dinner, I conveniently forget to take it off (although Iris will often say, “Dada, take off Dada’s apron”). This does leave a dangerously exposed area between the top of the apron and my neck, but it’s much better than nothing.

Perhaps my biggest sin in the kitchen is overuse of paper towels. The other day I went to the QFC in search of more, and the brand on sale was Brawny.

Brawny is not your sissy metrosexual paper towel. To use Brawny, you have to be like Brad Pitt, both in terms of the character he played in Fight Club and the Angelina Jolie-knocking-up character he plays in real life. If there is estrogen in your system, Brawny will recoil in horror when you touch it. A sheet of Brawny can withstand a kick from Jet Li. Brawny is the preferred paper towel for wiping down your axe after chopping a cord of wood.

In short, don’t even think about buying Brawny unless you fulfill both of these qualifications:

1. You are one bad motherfucker.
2. You can’t get enough Mary Engelbreit.