Weekly Dish

Muffins are a wonderful lazy morning food, I think. You can throw them together without too much effort or thought, enjoy a nice cup of coffee while they bake, and then leisurely nibble one or two or three as the morning turns to noon, drinking more coffee all the while. And once you’ve made a dozen, then you have a quick on-the-go breakfast for those not-so-lazy mornings that unfortunately have become more the norm around here.

Heavy with carrot, coconut, and chunks of apples, these muffins are packed with more nutrients than most, making them fair game for ARF/5-a-Day Tuesdays over at Sweetnicks. They are dense, moist, and laced with the spicy kick of cinnamon. Grating the carrots takes some time by hand, but a whirl in the food processor will also do the trick. Other than that step, they come together pretty quickly, leaving plenty of time for you to enjoy your morning.

Carrot, Coconut, and Apple Muffins

2 cups flour
1 1/4 cups sugar plus extra for sprinkling
2 t. baking soda
1/2 T. ground cinnamon
1/2 t. salt
2 cups carrots, peeled and grated (about 4 large carrots)
1 apple, small-diced
1/3 cup sweetened flaked coconut
1/2 cup melted butter
1/2 cup vegetable or canola oil
3 large eggs
1 T. vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Grease a muffin tin and set aside.

In a large bowl, stir together the flour, sugar, soda, cinnamon, and salt. Add the grated carrots, diced apples, and the coconut; stir to blend.

In a smaller bowl, whisk together the butter, oil, and eggs. Stir in the vanilla, and then add the wet ingredients to the dry all at once. Fold until just combined.

Spoon the batter evenly among the muffin cups. Sprinkle the tops with sugar, and bake for about 20 minutes, or until a knife inserted into the center comes out clean.

Note to faithful readers: Sorry for the sporadic posting; I had such grand illusions about my month-long break from school and how much fabulous food I would make and post about. There has certainly been no shortage of food creation, but I’ve been so busy enjoying sharing it with friends and family that I’ve neglected the documentation part of the process. Now that I’m back in a regular routine–summer school started today–I hope to post more regularly as well.

Another sort of technical note: Alanna brought it to my attention that my RSS feed has been acting up. Apparently, there are two Weekly Dish feeds, pre- and post-Wordpress. If you are a subscriber to the feed and your reader hasn’t updated in quite some time, would you be so kind as to drop a comment and let me know? I’d be oh so grateful.

Two things I have bought every week at the farmer’s market for the past few weeks: corn and shrimp. Both have a delicately sweet flavor that reminds me of summer, so the combination is a natural one in my mind.

Shrimp and corn soup as prepared in restaurants around here is usually either roux-based, dark and heavy, or cream-based, light in flavor but not in substance; both versions are a bit too hearty for this sultry summer heat.

This shrimp and corn soup is light and flavorful, packed with the flavors of the two featured ingredients and not much else, which, for this simple girl, is how soup should be. The broth I made from shrimp stock in my freezer, boiled with the leftover corn cobs, but you can make vegetable stock with the corn and water if you don’t have any shrimp stock on hand or if you’re pressed for time.

This soup is a good dish to make on a lazy summer afternoon–it takes a bit of time, but not much cooking really; most of the time you can spend sipping lemonade and watching the stock simmer. I served it with a green salad and Rosemary Olive Oil bread (Rorie’s recipe, which I altered by reducing the sugar to 1/2 cup and substituting pine nuts for the walnuts–it was fabulous!)

Summer Shrimp and Corn Soup

3 ears corn
1/3 cup milk
2-3 cups shrimp stock (or water)
1 T. olive oil
1/2 large sweet yellow onion
1 clove garlic
2 small new potatoes, small-diced
Salt and pepper, to taste
1 lb. of small to medium shrimp, shelled
Fresh basil leaves, for garnish

Cut the kernels for the corn cobs and set aside.
In a large pot, combine the shrimp stock with the trimmings from the onion and the corn cobs. Simmer for about 45 minutes.

In a small saucepan, cover the corn kernels with the milk and heat over medium until the milk boils; reduce the heat and simmer for about 5 minutes. Set aside.

Heat the olive oil over medium to medium-low heat; add the onion and garlic and cook until translucent but not brown, about 10 minutes. Add the potatoes, season with salt and pepper, then cover with stock. Simmer for about 30 minutes. Adjust seasonings and add the shrimp. Cook the soup for another 5 minutes, or until the shrimp are pink and opaque. Serve topped with chopped fresh basil. Serves 4 as an entree, 6-8 as a starter.

One of my favorite things to do at the end of the week is to open up the produce drawer in my refrigerator and cook what’s left. This vegetable plate represents such a venture: rosemary roasted potatoes, roasted carrots, fresh corn with basil, and chili-spiced Vidalia onion rings.

For the carrots and potatoes, I simply toss them with olive oil, sprinkle liberally with salt and pepper, (and chopped fresh rosemary on the potatoes) and roast in a 425-degree oven until they’re crispy on the outside.

These onion rings are simple too. Just don’t fry too many, they’re quite addictive, and they don’t keep well.

Chili-Spiced Onion Rings
2 medium Vidalia onions, sliced thickly
2 cups buttermilk, or enough to cover the rings
2 cups flour
2 T. corn starch
2 t. chili powder
1 t. paprika
1 t. cumin
1/4 t. cayenne pepper
2-3 cups canola or vegetable oil
Seasoning salt, to taste
Soak thickly sliced rings in buttermilk. Heat oil in a large pot over high heat, deep enough to completely immerse one layer of the rings. In a shallow dish, mix the flour, corn starch, chili powder, paprika, cumin, and cayenne. Dip each ring in the flour mixture to coat. Fry the rings in hot canola or vegetable oil (enough to immerse the rings completely) until brown and crispy. Be careful not to overcrowd the pan. Drain on paper towels, and sprinke with seasoning salt.
Besides the spices, flour, and olive oil, everything on our plate came straight from the Louisiana earth, and I can’t wait to fix seasonal variations of this meal over and over again. Or at least until the fruitful ground takes its next rest.

See that lovely tart in the picture? Yes, the one with the first-of-the-summer tomatoes, oiled and salted to bring out their sweet freshness, lying atop a bed of soft, buttery caramelized Vidalia onions. The one with the ooey gooey melted fresh mozzarella and the fresh basil leaves, wilted from the heat of the oven.

Would you like to know how delicious it tasted?

Yep, so would I.

Seconds after the photograph was taken, that lovely tart lay face down on my kitchen tiles, the victim of a violent combination: a super-slippery nonstick tart pan, an Orca oven mitt, and a slick plate. I turned to place the tart on a cutting surface to serve, just minutes before the next-to-last episode of LOST began, and, splat. Just like that, an hour’s worth of cooking and a market Saturday’s worth of tomatoes and onions lost to the not-so-recently mopped kitchen floor.

An hour later, Lebanese take-out assuaged my hunger, but the bitter taste of disappointment did not dissipate until morning.

Here’s the recipe anyhow; perhaps one day I’ll gather the courage to try it again and let you know how it comes out.

Tomato-Vidalia Tart
1 pie crust, refrigerated or homemade
3 small tomatoes, sliced into rounds
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 T. olive oil
Kosher salt
2 T. butter
1 medium Vidalia onion, sliced thinly into half moons
1/4 pound fresh mozzarella, sliced
1/4 cup basil leaves, chiffonade
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. In a small bowl, combine the tomato slices, olive oil, and 2 cloves of the minced garlic. Sprinkle with Kosher salt (about a teaspoon). Set aside.

Melt the butter over medium heat in a large skillet. Add the onions, and cook, stirring occasionally until they are golden brown (this process took me about 25 minutes, but it depends on the thickness and wateriness of your onions, so watch them carefully). When they are brownish, sprinkle liberally with Kosher salt.
Meanwhile, lay the pie crust over a tart pan; press into the sides and trim to fit around the edges. Sprinkle the remaining garlic clove evenly over the bottom of the crust. Bake for about 12 minutes, or until the bottom is beginning to brown. Spread the caramelized onions evenly over the bottom of the crust. Lay the tomatoes on top of the onion bed in two layers. Top with the mozarella cheese and half of the basil. Bake for another 8-10 minutes, or until the crust is brown and the cheese is melted. Top with the remaining basil. Be VERY careful removing the tart from the oven, and lay it on a safe surface to cut the pie into wedges.

I hope it’s good…maybe I’ll find out someday soon!

See all of those lovely vegetables? Garlic, spring onions, asparagus, yellow and green zucchini, all grown right here in my home state, in the ground just days before they arrived on my cutting board.

Every Saturday morning, David and I journey the mile or so down the road to our local farmer’s market, and I try really hard to buy most of my produce there. I also try to buy Kleinpeter or Smith Creamery dairy products, both local companies, and locally produced meat or chicken, and whenever possible, I look for locally made jams, jellies, and cheeses. Why?

Well, the first and most selfish reason is that local produce simply tastes better. Logically, strawberries harvested on a Thursday and sold to me on a Saturday morning are fresher than strawberries that must be picked before they’re ripe and have unnatural things added to them so that they can spend a week or longer on a truck or in a storeroom. That just makes good sense, right?

Also, though, I love to look into the faces of the people who grow the food I eat. The guy we usually buy strawberries from has a picture of his little girl taped to the top of the cash box, and, call me a sap, but I enjoy knowing that the money I put into that cash box is helping support the family of an honest, reliable small business owner and not to fund a multimillion dollar corporation. I also know, both from an economics class I took in college and from simple common sense, that money spent in my local economy returns to my local economy; buying local makes me a good neighbor and a smart citizen. And with increased gas prices, I’m guessing that the fewer miles my food travels, the better for the environment and the energy crisis. I’m no expert, of course, so if you want to read more excellent and well-thought out reasons to buy and eat locally, check out this post.

For the month of May, food bloggers are tackling the Eat Local Challenge. Largely an awareness-building and educational movement, the challenge is designed to get us all to be critical consumers, to think about where our food comes from and where we’re spending our money. While I don’t think it’s realistic to eat completely local all of the time–even more unrealistic for my friends who live in less agriculture-friendly climates than I do–, I support any effort to help people think about what they’re putting in their mouths, or, as I teach my students about media literacy, their brains.

While I’m not the kind of person who believes in beating people over the head with my politics, religion, or grocery-buying practices in order to convert them, I still thought it might be interesting for some of my readers to take a look at how I approach eating locally. For me, this commitment is year-round; every Saturday morning I try to make it to the market, and fortunately, I live in a place that grows at least some foods year round. I also check the labels at my grocery; I buy from a locally owned supermarket–not a chain–and so the owner is also invested in bringing local goods into the store. Plus, he is a local consumer, spending money in my local economy.

If you aren’t concerned with eating local, that’s fine by me. But if you are, I thought it might be useful to see how one gal does it. Lots of other people have done more research than I have and have stronger commitments to the movement, but for what it’s worth, this month, I’ll talk about the ingredients I’m buying and how I make my consumption choices. If you don’t care, feel free to skip down to the recipe; I’ll never know.

This pasta dish quintessentially represents my efforts at eating locally: not everything in the dish is locally made, as the pasta, mascarpone, olive oil, and Parmesan were all imported. But the recipe resulted from my weekly trip to the market: zucchini, asparagus, onions, tomato, and peppers were all available from local farmers, and so I made them the centerpiece of the meal. And that’s exactly how I like to challenge myself: not necessarily to buy only local ingredients but to buy as many as I can as often as I can and use those ingredients to come up with fresh dishes that taste like the season.

I call this dish Pasta Primavera because (besides the fact that many other people before me have used the title) the Latin roots of the word can mean literally first (prima) and spring (vera). These vegetables were the first ones available this spring season, and so I offer them up in a simple cream sauce that highlights the crisp, fresh taste of seasonal, local vegetables. However you choose to enjoy the first fruits of this season, I hope you eat fresh and well.

I’m sorry my posting has been so sporadic over the last few weeks; thankfully, the semester is over, and I have a bit of a break!

Pasta Primavera

1 pound linguine or other thin pasta
1 yellow bell pepper
1 red bell pepper
1 T. olive oil
1 T. butter
1 white or yellow onion, sliced thinly into half moons
20 stalks thin asparagus, chopped
1 green zucchini, sliced
1 yellow zucchini, sliced
1/4 cup white wine
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 tomato, diced
1/2 cup mascarpone cheese
1/4 cup half and half or heavy cream
Salt and pepper, to taste
Parmesan cheese, to taste

Preheat the broiler. Wash and dry the peppers and place on a foil-lined cookie sheet. Roast, under the broiler, for about 20 minutes, turning about every 5 minutes or so to make sure each side blackens. When all sides are charred, place the pepper in a bowl, and cover tightly with plastic wrap to steam. Set aside.

While the peppers are roasted, bring a pot of water to boil and cook the pasta. You can also use this time to prep the other vegetables. When the pasta is done, drain and place in a large bowl.

In a large skillet, heat half of the butter and olive oil. Add the onion. Cook over medium-high heat for about 10 minutes, until the onion is very soft and just beginning to turn golden. Add the asparagus and zucchini. Cook for 5 more minutes. Season well with salt and pepper, then pour in the wine and cover to let the vegetables absorb it. Cook about 2-3 minutes more. Dump this mixture into the bowl with the pasta and toss lightly.

When the peppers are cool enough to handle, peel the skin from them, remove the stem and seeds, and chop. Add them to the pasta bowl.

In the same skillet, heat the remaining half tablespoon of butter and oil. Add the garlic and cook for a few minutes over medium until soft. Add the chopped tomato and cook for another couple of minutes. Salt and pepper well. Stir in the mascarpone and half and half; cook and stir until it’s blended and creamy. Pour this sauce over the pasta and toss well. Top each serving with a healthy dose of freshly grated Parmesan cheese. Serves 4-6.

Note: Seasoning is the key to bringing out the flavor of the vegetables; salt well at every stage and the vegetables will absorb it into their own flavor. If you wait until the end, you risk the dish being salty rather than flavor-enhanced. I’ve made that mistake far too many times!

If you’re interested in other ways to cook asparagus, check out Kevin’s growing collection of asparagus recipes over at Seriously Good.

So, it turns out that I love to make gnocchi. After my frustrations with the little dumplings, I would never have thought I’d say that. But it’s true.

It also turns out, as luck would have it, that gnocchi works with another thing I love: sweet potatoes. After Ivonne’s recipe convinced me that gnocchi was doable, I decided to experiment a bit. My love of sweet potatoes has certainly not been a secret on this site, so this is one more recipe to add to the sweet potato collection.

For those of you who don’t know, gnocchi are little dumplings, usually made of potatoes and flour (although Ivonne convinced me that an egg is the magic thing to bind the dough together; I’ll never make gnocchi without the egg). They can be served with a sauce, or vegetables, or simply topped with butter and cheese.

For the sweet potato gnocchi? I opted for simplicity: a bit of garlic, a bit of freshly grated nutmeg, a bit of mascarpone, a bit of fresh Parmesan. All I can say is that I’m very sad I did not double the recipe to have leftovers. Yum!

Sweet Potato Gnocchi

2 medium-large sweet potatoes (about 2 pounds)
1 egg
1 t. salt
1 1/2 - 2 cups flour
3 T. butter
4 cloves garlic, sliced thinly
2 T. mascarpone cheese
1/4 cup grated Parmesan plus extra to serve
freshly grated nutmeg, to taste

Bake the sweet potatoes in the oven until they are easily pierced with a fork, about an hour at 350 degree works for my oven. Set aside until they are cool enough to handle. Peel and mash thoroughly with a potato masher or a fork. Be sure to get rid of any big lumps.

Mix the mashed potato with the egg; then, work in the flour with your hands, until the mixture sticks together and forms a dough-like ball (I started with 1 1/2 cups, but ended up using a little more than 2). On a floured work surface, knead the dough until it’s easily malleable but not sticky.

Form the dough into tennis ball-size rounds. Roll each ball into a long, snake-like coil, about an inch in diameter. Cut the coils into inch-long dumplings, sealing them with the back of a fork to make indentions. Put all the gnocchi in a bowl or on a tray, and refrigerate while you bring a large pot of water to boil.

When the water is boiling vigorously, add the gnocchi, one batch at a time, being careful not to overcrowd the pot. When they float, they’re done; remove with a slotted spoon to a colander to drain and finish cooking the remaining gnocchi.

When all the gnocchi are cooked, drain the water from the pot, and heat the butter over medium-low (I use the same pot). Add the sliced garlic, and cook until tender, about 3 minutes. Stir in the mascarpone and Parmesan. Season with grated nutmeg and Kosher salt. When the sauce is well-mixed, pour over the gnocchi to coat. Top each serving with extra Parmesan and extra grated nutmeg. Serves 2 hungry people.
And, to make this dish even more satisfying, sweet potatoes, although heavy on the carbs, are also packed with Vitamin A, B6, and C, making this gnocchi a good candidate for ARF Tuesdays over at Sweetnicks!

In warmer weather, I have been known to let my husband spend more time standing over the grill than I spend over the stove. I love the smoky flavor a charcoal fire imparts to meat, but I haven’t been very adventurous in my grilling of vegetables.

Last time we grilled chicken, I decided to give veggies a try. I marinated an eggplant and three portabellos in a basalmic-honey mixture, grilled them until tender, and cubed them when they were cool enough to handle. For a quick and easy side dish, I tossed the chopped vegetables with some cubes of fresh mozzarella and a basalmic vinaigrette. I loved the combination of the smoky grilled mushrooms and eggplant and the sweet-tartness of the dressing. Later, David admitted his skepticism (he’s not the world’s biggest fan of eggplant), but said he’d been pleasantly surprised by the end result.

I can imagine all sorts of additions that would make this grilled salad even better: red bell pepper, slivers of red onion, artichoke, asparagus. This version was even better the next day; I think it will serve us in the future as picnic fare or a simple make-ahead side dish.

Grilled Eggplant and Portabello Salad

1 small eggplant, quartered
3 large portabello mushrooms, halved
For the marinade:
1/2 cup basalmic vinegar
1/2 cup cider vinegar
1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup honey

For the dressing:
3 T. balsalmic vinegar
3 T. olive oil
2 T. honey
1/2 t. Kosher salt

1/4 pound fresh mozzarella, cubed

Mix up the marinade in a large baking dish. Add the vegetables, cut side of the vegetables down, cover, and refrigerate for at least a few hours. Turn and stir at least once, to make sure the veggies are soaking up the vinegary juices.

Grill the eggplant and mushrooms until charred and tender, over a medium-low flame, this took us about 20 minutes for the mushrooms about 40 for the eggplant. You can also cut the vegetables into smaller pieces if you like, which will help them to become tender quicker (before the outside is completely black).

Allow them to cool completely. Meanwhile, mix up the dressing in a small bowl: whisk together the honey and vinegar, and then incorporate the oil a drop at a time, whisking vigorously until the dressing emulsifies (thickens and doesn’t separate). Stir in the salt.
When the vegetables are cool, chop them into cubes and toss them with the mozzarella cubes and the dressing. Serves 4-6 as a side.

This veggie recipe is my contribution to ARF/5-a-day Tuesdays over at Sweetnicks. For more great good-for-you recipes, visit her site.

Every girl knows that a plain old salad needs the proper accessory to stand out. This sherry mustard vinaigrette is one I learned how to make at the restaurant where I waited tables in college; it was a house favorite. I think I ate a salad coated in its tangy sweetness nearly every workday for lunch. The greens in this photo came from our backyard (arugula, I think?), and the grilled chicken is made according to this recipe. It’s busy around our house, and this salad was the perfect throw-together springtime dinner.

Sherry Mustard Vinaigrette

3 T. cooking sherry (sherry vinegar will do in a pinch)
1 T. cider vinegar
2 t. cane syrup or honey
1 T. dijon mustard (I used the sweet-hot kind, but any mustard you like will do)
5 T. olive oil

Whisk together the vinegars, syrup or honey, and mustard. Whisk in the olive oil a drop at a time, stirring constantly, to emulsify. You can also do this in a food processor or a blender (but I would double the recipe; this amount hardly warrants a dirty blender, in my opinion).

Notes about the recipe: Many people prefer their vinaigrettes with a higher ration of oil to vinegar, but I like mine almost 1 to 1 for a couple of reasons. The first is that it slightly reduces the fat content of the dressing. Secondly, if the dressing is very flavorful, I am apt to use less of it, which also helps to reduce fat and calories. After all, if you’re going to eat salad for dinner, it might as well be as good for you as possible. Right?

I love to learn about new foods. One of the great things about reading other people’s food blogs is that I often come in contact with ingredients that are unfamiliar to me, and then I end up running into them somewhere else.

The weekly ARF/5-a-day event over at Sweetnicks keeps me trying to incorporate vegetables into our diet, and with spring upon us, I’d been searching for new veggies to love. Then, last week, I read Rorie’s post about her favorite spring risotto, with shallots, red onions, and fava beans. I’d never seen fava beans, much less cooked with them, so when I saw them at my farmer’s market on Saturday, I grabbed them.

I intended to make Rorie’s risotto, but, as often happens with my good intentions, I didn’t quite have everything I needed. No red onions or shallots to be found in my pantry. Besides, I didn’t have any homemade vegetable stock on hand either, and it’s really getting too warm outside to leave a burner on for that long in my kitchen. So, I set about prepping my beans, dug around in the fridge and the pantry, and ended up with this pasta.

What I didn’t know going into it is that preparing fresh fava beans for cooking is a bit of a process. They look like gigantic, engorged snow peas or butter beans in their shells, which are my very favorite springy green color (my kitchen is almost the very same green as a matter of fact!) Once you unzip their little pouches, you’ll find large, kidney-shaped beans buried inside, resting on pillows of blankety fuzz. After you pop them from their shells, then you blanch them, and then, you must peel the individual beans, removing the translucent casing on the outside. The outer peeling slides right off, so it’s not difficult, but it would be fairly time-consuming to go through this process for more than one armload of favas.

In the end, it was worth it; this pasta tastes as bright and springy as it looks, bites of sweet-salty ham and soft, caramelized sweet onions alternate with the earthy crunch of the edamame-esque beans beneath a light coating of cream and freshly grated Parmesan.

If you spy some fava beans at your local market, grab them while you can; the farmer who sold them to me warned me that their season is fleeting.

Spring Bean Pasta

1 cup of fresh fava beans, shelled (the amount in the picture above yielded about a cup of beans)
1 t. olive oil
1 cup ham, diced (I used honeybaked ham)
1/2 a sweet yellow onion, diced
2 carrots, peeled and chopped
3 cloves garlic, sliced
1/4 cup white wine
1/2 cup heavy cream or half and half
Freshly grated Parmesan cheese, to taste
3/4 pound pasta (I used rotini)

First, prepare your beans. After they’ve been shelled, fill a pot with about 2 inches of water (just enough to cover the beans), and bring the water to a boil. Add the beans and cook for about 4-5 minutes. Immediately drain and plunge into cold water. Let the beans cool. When they’re cool enough to handle, run your fingernail or a small knife around the outer casing, removing it from each bean.
Set the cooked, peeled beans aside. Cook the pasta in boiling water until al dente. Drain, and set it aside too.

In a large skillet heat a teaspoon of olive oil over medium heat. Add the ham and cook for a minute or two. Add the chopped onion and increase the heat to medium-high. Cook for about 5-7 minutes, or until the onion turns golden and soft. Add the carrots and garlic and reduce the heat back to medium. Cook until all the vegetables are soft and the onions are nice and caramelized, about another 5 minutes. Add the beans, and sprinkle with salt.

Pour in the wine, stirring until it evaporates. Douse the skillet with the cream, continuing to stir until the ham and vegetables are nicely coated. If you prefer to have a saucier pasta, you can add milk or more wine here. Serve the ham-vegetable sauce on top of a handful of noodles; top generously with grated Parmesan. Serves 4.

This recipe is my contribution to ARF/5-a-day Tuesday over at Sweetnick’s.

Every cook must have her proverbial thorn-in-the-side dish. You know, the one you’ve tried and tried and tried again only to fail miserably each time. My most recent thorn has been the little Italian potato dumplings called gnocchi. I once bought premade gnocchi from the grocery, and they were pretty good but really expensive for just potatoes and flour. So I tried to make my own. How hard could it be to bake a few potatoes and combine them with flour? I made a huge, sticky mess, and the dumplings (if you could call them that) tasted gluey and bland. My next attempts, using various recipes, were no different. So I decided to throw in the towel. If we were to eat gnocchi at our house, it would have to come from an expensive plastic package, much to my chagrin.

And then, the lovely and talented Ivonne at Cream Puffs in Venice posted a gnocchi recipe during her Piemontese foods series in honor of the Olympics. She swore it was easy and fool-proof, and her instructions, complete with pictures, looked as if they might end my gnocchi woes.

With some sideline coaching from Ivonne, I’m happy to report that the gnocchi turned out just as she describes: the dough was elastic but not too sticky, and the dumplings floated to the top when they were ready, just as they were supposed to. Mine aren’t quite as pretty as hers; I couldn’t quite get the hang of the fork indentions, but they tasted lovely nonetheless. I tossed the hot dumplings with butter and a combination of fontina and Parmesan cheeses, as Ivonne suggests. To make the meal a bit more substantial and add some color, I topped each serving with a spoonful of chunky oven-roasted tomato sauce. The end result was a delightfully simple and satisfying supper.

Notes: The problem, I discovered, with my earlier gnocchi attempts was that I was using regular baking potatoes that are entirely too starchy. Waxy potatoes make a huge difference! I used Yukon Golds for this recipe. Also, refrigerating the dumplings before adding them to the boiling water also helps a great deal. They hold their shape nicely after having some time to firm up in the fridge. If you’re looking for a fool-proof way to try gnocchi, I urge you to try Ivonne’s recipe. I’m already thinking of variations for my next attempt…