Trout with Garlic Lemon Butter

This was sort of an interesting meal experiment. It's based on a recipe from The Stinking Rose Restaurant's cookbook. It's possibly my favorite restaurant, and I've really gotten to love cooking out of the cookbook at home as well.

But, I say this is based on the recipe because nothing went quite according to plan. The recipe in the book is actually for Lemon Baked Salmon with Garlic Caper Butter.

However, that's not what actually ending up happening. I apparently looked at the wrong week's sale ad today for the grocery, so they didn't have the salmon that I thought would be there. But, there was some fairly nice looking trout. I'm also not in love with capers (and the jar in my fridge looked a bit off, so I tossed them. Upon retrospect, they could've actually been there for years). Finally, I decided to be bold and not really measure a lot of stuff. So this is what I did.

I tried to bring about 3/4 a stick of unsalted butter to room temperature. It sort of worked. I actually put it in the microwave for a few seconds as well. I then mixed it with the juice from half a lemon, a tablespoon of white wine, and two (albeit very large) cloves of minced garlic. I folded in some fresh parsley and then added salt and pepper.

Then I put the trout in a baking dish and added 1/2 cup of water. I put the trout in the dish and spread some of the butter mixture on each fillet (I think about a tablespoon on each) and then topped it with some slices of lemon. It baked on 325 for about 15 minutes. I wasn't sure it was done, so I bumped up the temperature to 400 and baked it another 5.

It's served on some leftover egg noodles from last night. I put another tablespoon or so of the butter mixture in a saucepan and let it cook for a few minutes (since the garlic was raw). Then I just tossed the leftover pasta around in it. The noodles did originally have some butter and parmesan cheese on them, but this butter addition definitely helped. On Friday night they were far too bland.

It was really quite tasty, but the garlic was very strong on the fish. I think it would've been nice to cook the garlic a bit first. Some roasted garlic cloves in the butter would be great as well. I liked the butter mixture so much that I saved the leftovers to do something else with later this week. Maybe just put it on fish again, who can say?