How could I forget my Bagel Biter?

Among my first posts was a list of my favorite gadgets. Yesterday I was shopping at Bed, Bath and Beyond and saw a man standing in line with a Bagel Biter. When I came home to blog, I realized I had never put that on my list! It's not really a cooking tool, per se, which is probably why I forgot it, but it is a handy kitchen gadget.

Good bagels are not plentiful in Indiana, but Panera has very respectable bagels, so I stock up every time I am in Fort Wayne. Not quite a New York bagel (I'm a native New Yorker), but they are far superior to the impostors at the grocery store (my theory is that everything at the grocery store is just squishy white bread in different shapes). There is a Big Apple Bagel not too far away, but I never have cause to go to that neck of the woods, so Panera it is. And I think that Big Apple Bagel uses cornmeal on the bottom of the bagels. Heresy. No cornmeal on bagels or pizza crust. But that's another story...

I used to have Panera slice the bagels with their large chute/slicer contraption (very convenient!), but then I got frustrated with the number of bagels that would have one very thin half and one very thick half. So, I searched high and low for the bagel guillotine, as I've seen them called. Sure, you can use a serrated knife, but after almost slicing a piece of my finger off while trying to slice a bagel a few years back, I prefer this safer contraption. The only bad part is that Panera's bagels are so large, it can be a bit difficult to even get them IN the slicer.

Anyway, that's a very long-winded way of saying that I love my Bagel Biter.