cooking with chris: gnocchi

one of the perks of dating a (aspiring) chef is free cooking lessons. A more obvious perk would be the delicious food he makes for me, but we've been together long enough that we're past that initial impress phase, and have moved on to educating each other on our interests. At some point, Chris plans to teach cooking classes, so as a precursor to that, he's been teaching me how to cook various dishes. So far, we've covered potato karrokes (croquettes), ravioli made from scratch (pasta too!), homemade lasagna with pink sauce (red + white, mmm), and braising. All of these dishes I made before I started this blog, but now that it's here, I'd like to showcase my culinary progress, starting with last night.

he taught me how to make gnocchi, which, for those who don't know, is definitely one of my absolute favorite dishes. Gnocchi Thursdays will now be the new Taco Tuesdays, hell yes! To make Gnocchi Thursdays happen, here's how you make gnocchi:

Basic Gnocchi (serves 2)
3-4 potatoes
flour
salt
1-2 egg yolks

the first part is easy. It's like your making mashed potatoes. Start boiling some water. Meanwhile, wash, peel, and chop your potatoes. Boil them and add salt to flavor until tender. Drain the potatoes, and mash them up. We use a ricer, but you can also use a mixer or any other type of potato mashing utensil. The key thing is that it has to be mashed to a really smooth consistency.

egg yolks are optional, but according to Chris, they help hold the dough together, so you'd only need about one. We used 2 because I generally like my stuff eggier (omelettes, leche flan, custard, you get the idea). Anyway, add your egg yolks and flour to the potatoes. There should be about one cup of flour per potato. Knead that (and any other spices or salt to flavor) in until you have a nice dough that you can shape.

divide your dough in thirds. Take one of the thirds and lightly flour a flat surface. Roll the potato dough into a long strip about an inch thick (or thinner for gnocchini). Cut into small pieces; I just eyeballed it to form little pillows. Lightly use the tines of a fork to press a little design into each piece of gnocchi, and there you have it! Simple as pie. Trust me, if I can do it, you can.

to cook the gnocchi, boil some water. When the water begins to boil, just add the gnocchi and when it floats, it's done cooking. Ours took about 3 minutes to cook. Add any sauce of your choice on top and some basil. We made a simple red sauce with crushed tomatoes, sauteed onions, garlic, zucchini, salt, and pepper. Ooh, and for an even better taste, before adding the sauce, I'd sautee the cooked gnocchi in some butter! Bon appetit, or what I like to say, Mahlzeit!