Italian Cibo Weekend!

Last Saturday, my dorm house had Italian food catered to us for the Lucid Dinner. Lucid was our first house Dean, and he made a bunch of cool traditions that carry on to this day (e.g. study break!!).

 Last Sunday, my GA invited all of us (about 15 showed up?) to make Italian gnocchi! I have failed at making gnocchi once before, and this time, I got to learn from an Italian!! It was great, and I had a lot of fun!! I skipped half of my organic chem workshop for it, but who cares?! I even learned how to roll a properly shaped gnocchi using a fork!

 First we all peeled potatoes. 5lbs?

 Then we cut the potatoes and boiled them.

 We all mashed them directly on the table!

 And added a lot of flour to it, and rolled them out and cut them. We made a LOT OF DELICIOUS GNOCCHI!!

 My GA made some vodka + cream + tomato sauce. I've had vodka sauce once before, and it wasn't great at all! This time, it was great - fresh, creamy, tangy.

Potato Gnocchi

With a surplus of potatoes, I've been thinking of ways of eating them (other than mashed potato, even though I love mashed potato), and one of the ideas I found was potato gnocchi. I'm not really a gnocchi fan, since I don't have an emotional association with it. In addition, since we lack sauce in the house, the gnocchi is just another carbohydrate at dinnertime that pairs well with spicy stir fried Chinese food.

I agree with the recipe; the potatoes should've been baked instead of boiled because that way, they would've been drier and I wouldn't've obtained soggy, gruel-like gnocchi. Ah well. At least they stayed in shape (irregular) and didn't disintegrate in the boiling water. Maybe I should've baked them or fried them.

I don't think that this was the most appetising way of using potatoes, so I'm never making potato gnocchi again. Instead, I'm just going to make a freezer-shelf full of potato cake (tomorrow's post), which everyone, even MY SISTER, enjoyed.

INGREDIENTS

800 g mashed potato

~140 g whole-wheat flour (just keep adding until the dough is malleable and not too sticky)

oregano

pepper

salt

METHOD

1. Mix everything.

2. Pluck small balls from the dough and stick into a pot of boiling water.

3. Take out after a few minutes.