... you can eat pizza anytime.

Some foods you grow to miss and why wouldn't you. A mexican restaurant that serves bottomless chip baskets, brownies warm and fudgy from the oven or a hamburger with crisp lettuce, thick tomatoes and solid pickle coverage. But the past few weeks I have been getting fidgety for bagel bites. I don't like bagel bites. I ate them rarely as a teenager and even less often in college but lately I can't resist the idea and I think it has something to do with the sum of their parts: crisp bread and bubbly cheese, one after another. The hankering will pass but for now I have come up with a solution that is infinitely better than the real deal and was stumbled on rather than invented. A friend had recently visited Costco (of all things to make it overseas) and had racked up on bagels, shampoo, chocolates and olives in the standard "bulk" packaging. To an outsider I'm sure that such a food cache being hauled back on the train must look like an angry but not uncosmopolitan giant had been robbed. Could I speak Japanese (my enduring hypothetical) I might shake my head at the intrigued passenger.
"Son of a bitch all most bit me in half but would you look at this bag of walnuts! Closed that beanstalk down, man."
After a substantial bagel donation, I got the remedy. I had made salsa for a Christmas party, and had quite a few tomatoes left over. The recipe is simple:

Halfed bagel
Sliced tomatoes
Sliced onion
Thinly sliced cheddar cheese on top

Bake for 10 min in a fish broiler.

It has been delicious.