Sunday, August 30, 2009

the case of the disappearing gnocchi.

so my father and pat-ricia (my step-mom) and cousin (my cousin...yes, her name is cousin) are coming to visit next weekend. it's the first time that all three will be at our apartment and we like to share delicious food creations with guests, so we decided that in order to be able to really impress, we'd have to practice...

...we invited meg over to experiment, too. well i'm not so sure she was ready to experiment, but ready to eat dinner when she showed up at eight pm. the following is a semi-timeline of events:

8pm: meg shows up, bottle of shiraz in hand. we are currently hanging HIDEOUS yellow curtains in our living room and finishing measuring to hang a mirror. meg was taken aback by the yellow curtains and sat in a dazed state while we finished the mirror.

9pm: FINALLY start the water to boil the potatoes...which have to be boiled whole for some reason. at that point we decide to open the wine since it was 9pm and we figured we'd sip while we waited for our dinner...which shouldn't be too much later. and we also decided that we'd be AWESOME and use our cool decanter:



then ryan decided to have meg taste the wine to make sure it tasted delish.

9:30 - we were getting a LITTLE hungry as we waited for the potatoes...and since we were drinking wine, we figured why not have some crackers and cheese with it? the only problem was that our only source of crackers and cheese were these delightful little treats:


...don't worry we also managed to pull out some cold pre-cooked smoked sausage. it was like were in france.

10pm: So we sat around sipping and munching on our DELISH crackers and ryan gave the signal that the potatoes were ready to go through the potato ricer! it was a very exciting moment. so we all assembled back into the kitchen and took a turn mashing one potato each...first ryan, then meg, then me:





Once we got all of the potatoes mashed we added in the flour according to some silly lady online. she wasn't very smart and clearly didn't know how much flour we should add, but we listened to her anyways.



So ry finished mixing the dough and Meg had to explain the thickness of the gnocchi. it's supposed to be as big as a fingernail.

10:15 pm After finally finishing rolling out the gnocchi it was finally time to put the first batch in. We had instructions to leave them in until they floated...so we did. but then we decided that floated FAR too quickly (about 30 seconds after dropping them in). since they floated so quickly, we thought it was obvious that they should stay in a little bit longer, so we left them in. five minutes later we went back to look at them:


there was literally NO gnocchi in there. ryan thought i was kidding so he had to take a peek for himself. there were absolutely NO gnocchi. NONE. they literally disintegrated and dissolved. there were no pieces floating around...it was just startchy water.

10:30pm considering we had been cooking since nine, the first bottle of wine was gone and we still had no gnocchi.


so we went back to the drawing board and decided to add a TON more flour until we felt as though the dough was a proper consistency. the only flaw with this plan is we don't really know how to recreate the gnocchi since we don't know how much flour was used. but it was okay because we were doing little testers. we dropped in three gnocchi at first and we set the counter with three taster stations ... one for each of us. we made megger go first.


that is CLEARLY a face that loves the gnocchi. A SUCCESS!!!!!!!! so we dropped in the rest of the gnocchi and i finished the chili goat cheese sauce (i started that when we dropped the first batch of disappearing gnocchi...). and TA-DA!!!!!!


10:57 pm. gnocchi complete. dinner is served.

so since it was 11pm and we were just sitting down to dinner we decided to open another bottle:

and we proceeded to eat and talk and laugh until 1am. it was one of the most fun and relaxing evenings we've had in a while. it was so great not having to go out and do anything to entertain ourselves. all we needed was a few potatoes, some flour and ourselves. i am constantly reminded about how it is such a blessing to be surrounded by such good friends. there is nothing i enjoy more than sitting around the table eating, drinking and laughing and having good quality conversation. it was really a perfect evening.





2 comments:

  1. MMMM, we always thought that the mishaps of cooking were a result of the combo of cousin and cousin. Since Cousin was not there, I am beginning to wonder if they might just be the result of one cousin's cooking skills?????

    Perhaps after next weekend we will know for sure. Love, AC

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  2. i bet ryan ate all the gnocchi when nobody was looking

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