This meal was from two nights ago. Last night I was planning on making something totally food blog-worthy with salmon. I made this vinaigrette and salad that was supposed to go with it, with the intention of cooking the salmon quickly when Georg got home from tennis. Well, that plan went fine until I realized that I had pulled pork, not salmon, out of the freezer to thaw. I was shocked, my mind racing to find a solution. At first I dashed to the freezer, got the frozen salmon out, and put it under some cold water to quick-thaw it. But I knew there'd be no way to thaw a pound and a half of salmon in a short period of time, and it was already 8pm. So I put some plastic wrap over the vinaigrette and salad, and that will have to wait until tomorrow. Faced with having to make an impromptu meal involving pork chops, I boiled some peeled potatoes, cooked the pork chops in a pan, and sauteed some bok choy. It was OK but nothing food blog-worthy.
So I will post about my meal from two nights ago, as I started to tell you a paragraph earlier. I had a great experience last time I made homemade gnocchi, all you do is mix cooked potato with flour and maybe an egg and form it into a log, which you cut into little dough-puffs and boil. I think it's best served in some sort of herb-butter sauce--last time I used fresh thyme from my now-defunct herb garden (and when I say defunct, I mean DEAD, although I really hate to admit it to myself). This time I decided to make it with butternut squash, a recipe I saw on Food Network from Emeril Lagasse. He recommends serving it in a balsamic vinegar and sage butter sauce, but I knew from the start I'd leave the vinegar out. There is something so comforting about those soft pillows of dough browned just slightly in the butter, and I thought the edge the vinegar would provide would be unwelcome. To begin, I roasted a butternut squash cut in half in the oven. When tender I scooped the flesh into a bowl and added oregano, fresh sage, salt, pepper, olive oil, and enough flour to make it into a dough (around 3 cups). After that, I divided the dough into fourths and rolled each fourth into a long dough-log. Each log is cut into little gnocchi and then boiled.
Honestly, working with the squash as a base for the gnocchi was much more challenging than just using potato. The squash, being wetter I suppose, yielded a sticky dough that I kept having to tame with more flour. Plus I guess the starchiness from a potato makes dough stick together better. This was still a fun experiment. After I cut the squash gnocchi and boiled them to cook them, I put them in a skillet with half a stick of butter and some more fresh sage. The sage got crispy in the hot butter, as did most of the gnocchi.
We enjoyed them with some oregano and lemon marinated chicken breasts and a walnut/beet salad with poppyseed dressing, but really the gnocchi are so filling I just filled up on those and made Georg eat most of my chicken. It was a nice time to have this sort of meal; it was the night when all that thunderstorming was going on. I wasn't really in the mood to take the pictures of my food, but I did anyway, and you can tell in them my heart wasn't really in it :)
Oh, and I do want to mention that if anybody ever wants to cook something on this blog, I would be happy to supply the recipes and note which substitutions or alterations I made. I don't think anyone who reads this so far is as into cooking as I am--I imagine most people would rather look than actually try the recipe. But if I'm wrong I'd be happy to supply them.
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