gnocchi

Welcome back, fuckers. Today is hump day, and it's been a crazy week thus far, the most notable recent event being the extremely severe food poisoning I've somehow acquired which has had me shitting water for the last two days. I feel fucking terrible. My bowels haven't been this empty in a very long time.

I deliberately left you all with a cliffhanger yesterday; what's sauce without a vessel to carry it to your pie-hole? We're gonna put that sauce to work in what has to be one of the most comforting dishes of all time: gnocchi, or, for the layman, potato pasta dumplings. The ultimate human experience.

My family DOES have a proprietary gnocchi recipe, but it's neither vegan nor gluten-free. Luckily, the internet has provided me with the knowledge I need to succeed. I asked the Google machine what it knew about making gnocchi without all the good stuff: my initial search yielded many different contenders, but the majority of them seemed suspect at best. The most reasonable formula of the bunch and the one we will be following today comes from a lovely site called Catching Seeds; click through at your own risk, as her blog is much nicer than this one. Today will be a take on her recipe, with a few slight modifications on my part.

These gnocchi don't require much, but they really do pack a wallop.

two potatoes

two cups of rice flour

one quarter of a cup of cornstarch

two tablespoons of olive oil

one teaspoon of salt

Get the spuds in some boiling water. You want them very soft, but not soggy. Mine were real nice and fat, so I soaked them in there for a good forty-five minutes over high heat.

Once they're both hot and ready, drain, rinse, and remove the skins. Get them both in a big bowl for the mashing of their lives.

There's something so soothing about destroying beautiful things. Once you've given them the business, squirt 'em with a little bit of olive oil. Sift your flour, cornstarch, and salt together and toss that on top.

Hachi machi, that's a pretty pizza pie. Stop staring. Fold until homogenous.

By this point you should definitely be kneading. The lack of gluten admittedly makes it difficult to roll the dough out properly like real gnocchi, but that wasn't enough to prevent me from moving forward, and it certainly shouldn't be enough to stop you, either.

Portion out teaspoon-sized gobs of the stuff and mold them into your desired shape. There are a lot of fancy ways to do this part, but I decided that I wasn't going to do any of them and chose instead to keep them plain and modest, forming them into little bars of soap with my palms. Just like mama used to make.

Once you've exhausted the ball of dough, you should be left with a sizable number of lumps. Get a large pot of water over a medium-high flame. Add a bit of salt and a drizzle of olive oil.

They're ready to take a bath; are you gonna be the one to give it to them? These things don't take long to cook, maybe two or three minutes at the very most. Get another pan hot and start heating up a bit of your sauce.

It feels silly scraping around an empty pan. You just want to keep it busy until the gnocchi are done.

When they're all floating at the top like this, they're ready to come out of the pool. Toss them into the sauce along with a tablespoon or two of the water they cooked in to help everything get all sticky and gooey.

Nice. That actually turned out better than expected, I was worried the sauce would have trouble clinging to the gnocchi without the customary fork divots I made no attempt to impress upon them.

I kept things simple here, but I fully believe that with a little bit of TLC this dish has the potential to get you laid. Top with nooch and mangia.