2013 - Week 15

Hi from Week 15 :)

Unfortunately, this was kind of a disappointing week. I kept up with my Bible reading, dream journal, and daily memory journal, but other than that, I didn't make much progress. I thought that going through all of my pictures for my scrapbooking task would be fun, and some of it was, but then I realized that when I organized them all last year, I think I picked the wrong ones. Here's what I mean . . . I used to have a Mac, and it saved all of my pictures in "Originals", "Modifieds", and "Thumbs" folders. So I thought I copied the originals or modifieds to my current computer, but now going through them, a lot of them are very small and really low quality, so I must have gotten only the thumbnails for some of them. So my entire time on my internship and quite a few other big life events now have very poor quality photos representing them. It's really a bummer. A few of the folders that were affected I was able to salvage because my husband also had copies of my pictures (engagement pictures, a vacation, etc.) but some of them he did not have and are now lost forever. If I would have been smart, I wouldn't have deleted the originals off of our external hard drive where I was storing them, but that was my way of keeping track of my progress . . . when I imported them into my new computer, I deleted them from the hard drive so I didn't have duplicate copies. I guess that was a bad idea. So I'm pretty bummed about that, but there's really nothing I can do about it, so there's no use fussing over it I guess. I'm planning on just taking a few of my favorites and printing them off at a smaller size so the grainy-ness of the photos isn't as evident and hopefully it will work out okay.

My exercising was a highlight though . . . a friend let me borrow her "Gold's Gym Cardio Workout" Wii game (which, so far has consisted of mostly boxing), so I'm having fun with that. It seems like it has a lot to progress through and I do feel sore after doing it, so we'll see how it goes in the future.

So other than that, for my "new thing" this week, I made some pizza out of focaccia bread that I had made. It turned out pretty well (I used the Panera Bread focaccia recipe found in this book: Panera Bread Cookbook. It's a really easy and tasty recipe.) I took the bread and sliced it in half, and then I should have toasted it first, but I didn't, so the sauce made the bread a little soggy, but it was still good. I just put a simple topping of pizza sauce, pepperoni, and mozzarella cheese on it. Then I baked it and served it with a salad . . . yum.

Focaccia Pizza

Since that wasn't technically new, just a reinvention of something I already had, I did try one other recipe. If you read my post last week, you saw my trial of a thick and chewy chocolate chip cookie recipe from my friend's blog, All Food Considered. He was comparing two ways of making chocolate chip cookies chewy, using melted butter or oatmeal. Last week, I tried the melted butter method, and let me tell you, they were fantastic. This week, I tried the oatmeal method (recipe here) and while they were good (and just as big as last weeks :)), they didn't beat out the melted butter method . . . surprise, surprise ;) They are definitely more filling though and still tasty. You could even add nuts to make them more nutritious. Perhaps I cooked them a bit long, but they got a little hard and needed microwaving to make them soft again after a couple of days. The others didn't need that.  So if you want a little healthier version, go with the oatmeal ones, but if you are really looking for a tasty, awesome chocolate chip cookie, stick with the melted butter version :) On second thought, the oatmeal ones actually had more butter in them than the melted butter version, so forget about the oatmeal version, just make the first ones :)

Before baking

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

 In other news, I made the roasted garlic and sweet potato soup again with more imitation "Cheddar Bay biscuits" that I talked about in Week 11. Oh goodness, so good . . . I think that meal was the highlight of my week ;) So here's to a better week next week. I hope you are all doing well. See you back here later :)