After Jan canceled on our lunch (she came down with a fever), my sister and I did some baking. She’s been on a cooking & baking mood lately and marked off a whole bunch of recipes she wanted to try in the recipe book.

The Chocolate Almond Biscotti recipe both caught our eyes because the picture was beautiful and the directions were very easy. But, since I’m not fond of almonds, we changed it to chopped pistachios and vanilla extract, as opposed to chopped almonds and almond extract.

I went about peeling over a ½ cup of pistachios by hand. It wasn’t fun, but it went by fast as we chatted away. Originally, I was going to emulate the TV chefs and chop them by hand, but then I realized how much of an amateur I was compared to them. Plus, there was the big possibility of making a mistake and cutting myself… So, electric chopper it is!

She wanted to be in charge of doing everything herself, so I was just there as my sister’s helper. I ended up helping cut up the biscotti and melting the chocolate that went on top of them.

 
(Click the thumbnails for a bigger size.)It turned up much better than we had expected, especially with the substitutions we made. Overall, we were very happy with the result. When Jan and I rescheduled our lunch, I brought her a bag of biscotti to try. She loved them!