Life's Lab Notebook: 2013

Hello from Week 40 :) This week, I tried out my hour long Pilates work out. It wasn't as difficult as I remember it being from doing it in high school, but it was still pretty challenging. Also, our house hunting is going very well :) I'm happy to report we have an accepted offer!!!!!!!!! We still have the inspection and all of that to do, but if all goes well, our days in our apartment are numbered :) Anyone want to help us move? ;)

As for recipes, I was quite busy this week. First of all, with the help of my lovely husband (who did the nasty head chopping off part), I made some baked trout. One of my coworkers really enjoys fly fishing but doesn't like to eat the fish that he catches, so he shared some with me. I'd never had trout before, but this method of cooking them was excellent, and if you don't mind picking out all of the bones, the trout was very good :) I combined a few different recipes and finally came up with my method: After cleaning and removing the heads, rinse the trout in cold water and pat dry with a paper towel. Rub olive oil inside and out and season with some salt and freshly ground pepper. Stuff a few lemon slices and some fresh parsley inside the fish, place fish on a piece of aluminum foil with a few more lemon slices, and seal up in a packet shape. Bake at 400 F for ~25 minutes or until the thickest portion is at 140 F. Enjoy. Hooray for almost free, healthy dinners :)

I also wanted bake something special for a dear friend who lives far away. Since I had to ship it in the mail, I did a little research on what sort of foods last a really long time, and the best dessert I could come up with was biscotti. Last year, she had been missing pumpkin pie, so this year I decided on gingerbread biscotti . . . hopefully the flavors remind her of home :) I've never actually had biscotti before, and gingerbread isn't my favorite flavor, so these weren't my favorite cookies. But I think biscotti is typically dipped in coffee, so that might improve them. They are pretty good, if you like crunchy biscotti :)

Shaping biscotti

Finished product

I signed up to make treats for our church's Sunday morning Bible study this week too and instead of the usual ~30 people, this session there has been close to 100 every week. This is wonderful, but it meant that I was going to have to make LOTS of treats. I made the following recipes: cinnamon coffee cake II, a double batch of mini cheese danishes, a double recipe (in a 13" x 9" pan) orange cornmeal cake (covered with orange glaze (1 cup powdered sugar + 3 Tbsp. orange juice, omit sugar topping)), and 24 chocolate peanut butter cupcakes (I used an apple corer to remove the centers before adding filling, the bag piping did not work). I must say, they were all tasty and well received :)