Making Bread Crumbs and Seasoned Bagel Chips

This is kind of silly to post here, but a friend of ours has been getting bagels and muffins in ample supply from a local donut place when it's time for them to close for the night.  He'll get about a half a garbage bag full of 3-4 different kinds of bagel (plain, french toast, onion and multi-wheat) and the same goes with the muffins (cinnamon, pistachio, bran and chocolate chip).  There's been so much of the stuff that my freezer is kind of just a storage zone for bagel central.

Orginally he was getting this plethora of mana for another friend who owns their own farm and was going to give it to his livestock.  We came across this info and asked if we could get some the next time he was planning to do a bagel and muffin run.

Boy did he deliver.  I looked inside the bag and immediately thought, holy s#!%^, that's a lot!

A few days ago I took two bagels that looked like they were starting to seriously go stale and hard (they're a weapon at that point, or they could make a good brick if you were building a house) and thought what better way to use a bagel than to make some bread crumbs?

My poor blender. As I took ripped pieces of the bagel to grind up, the blender whirled and moaned and hissed in protest. I don't think this cheapy $10 blender was meant for such stressful labor. But in the end, it did its job and 2 bagels had a yield of 4 cups of bread crumbs.

Not that I want to be overflowing in breadcrumbs but I don't want to see the bagels go to waste.  Grandma and Uncle D. mentioned to try and make bagel chips, and I may just do that.

Maybe the seasoned chips should be:

• butter, olive oil and garlic/onion powder
• cinnamon and sugar
• olive oil and parmesan

There are some sweet bagels in the mix that I think the sugar mixture might be pretty nice. Only downfall is that I'll be working with a toaster oven and this may just take forever (oven is currently used as pots and pan storage because the house alarm is RIGHT OVER IT! stupid architects).

Anyway, today going to use some of the breadcrumbs to make briciole/ brizole (the Italian dish that looks like huge meatballs in marinara). Going to wing it but the ingredients are pretty much:

• Meat
• bread crumbs
• garlic and onion seasoning
• salt and pepper
• tomato sauce

On a damp and rainy day this may just hit the spot.