Whole Wheat Bread

I've been looking for a bread recipe where the bread will last more than a few hours--made some delicious stuff right out of the oven, but then it gets rock hard and no good the next day.

Any ideas? I went with a Whole Wheat bread recipe from Cooks' Illustrated, but the problem is there are way too many sessions of waiting for it to rise for the time I have as a parent of a 17 month old...so instead everything has been overnight (45 minutes, nope, overnight in the fridge...60 minutes, no overnight in the fridge).

This bread is going to be ridiculously old by the time it gets baked. We'll see baking comes tomorrow.

Eltana--a oasis in Seattle's Bagel wasteland

This is S...

So one of the first things that R, J and I do anytime we go to canada is look for montreal style bagels. This started the very first time when visiting my high school friend Mark in Burlington during college, and took off when my folks were living in Toronto and we would go down to St. Laurence Market for them, bagels that are smaller, a bit sweeter and way more complex in flavor than anything we could find in the US. Montreal style bagels are boiled and then baked in a wood fired oven.

Since then we've been bringing home at least two dozen bagels anytime we go to Vancouver.

But recently a wonderful thing happened--into the bagel wasteland of Seattle came Eltana, a montreal-style bagel place with some really friendly folks working there, and it opens early--6 AM. About 6:45 AM last weekend J and I were there since she decided to get up and they gave us a tour, gave her dough to play with, amazing.

Even more amazing, those bagels are awesome. I have a dream of making a brick oven in our backyard if/when we ever buy a house, and bagels would be part of that.
I totally agree with this reviewer:
http://blog.seattlepi.com/tastingmenu/archives/238299.asp

Go check it out for yourself.