A Gnocchi Story

(Source)

Oh, what’s that??

It looks good!

When I saw a recipe for beet gnocchi in the latest issue of Cooking Light, I jumped all over it.  Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I have a July birthday, but I can’t turn down ruby-colored things.  This includes red velvet, anything involving beets, and, well, actual rubies.

Knowing root vegetables take forever to cook, I popped the beets and potatoes in the oven as soon as I got home at about 5:15.  An hour later, the potatoes were pretty much still rock hard… of course, so I put them back in the oven.  It was close to 7 by the time the veggies were finally done cooking.  At this point you’re supposed to use a potato ricer. I have no idea what a potato ricer is, so I just mashed everything up in my food processor.

Then, another road bump.  We added the flour and the dough was still so sticky.  Like, can’t touch it without half of it sticking to your fingers, sticky.  We added a little more flour, then a little more.  Still sticky.  Joey, the eternal optimist, still wanted to try to roll it out.  Shockingly, it didn’t seem to want to roll.  And yes, that’s sarcasm.  We did manage to make a few gnocchi pieces so we thought ‘why not, let’s boil them in water and see what happens.’

If you’ve ever made gnocchi, you know that the telltale sign that they’re done is that they will float to the top of the pot.  We watched a single piece of gnocchi float around at the bottom of the pot, occasionally looking like it was about to emerge from the water, only to be sucked back down to the bottom.  This was at 8 o’clock and I made an executive decision to run across the street to Target and just buy gnocchi.  That way, we could still finish the recipe and not waste the 6 cups of onion Joey had just chopped.

Joey is like the poster child for never giving up.  When I got back from the store, he had managed to roll out more of the dough, cook the dough, and sauté the gnocchi with some of the beet greens and onions.  We went ahead and cooked the store-bough gnocchi, just in case ours tasted horrible.

The best part though, was that despite having pre-made perfectly-shaped gnocchi, which I imagine Giada de Laurentiis personally made from scratch, Joey and I kept finding ourselves sneaking bites off of the small plate we made with our own gnocchi.  In fact, after dinner, we ended up rolling and cooking the rest of the dough.  And now we’ll be eating gnocchi for the rest of the month…

Last night’s dinner adventure had its fair share of setbacks, frustrations and failures, but you know what, we had a blast together in the kitchen.  It took me back to the days when we first started cooking together.  When we burnt the bottom of pans, couldn’t get chicken to cook for the life of us and made laughable mistakes.  Until last night, I almost forgot that the experience of working and learning together in the kitchen is what made me love cooking in the first place.

So here’s to many more cooking adventures.  Frustrations, mess-ups and laughter included.