When you are cooking in a one bedroom apartment that is not yours, you have to be creative about how to cook what you would be able to do in YOUR kitchen. I also do not like to eat out so we experiment with different types of food. It is also different to cook in a different country where things do not always taste the same. Ask about German Strength onions or English peanut butter or the whole adventure of trying to find sour cream on two continents and three countries.
So one day I mentioned that I have had gnocchi recently and decided that if cooked well...it is good. Matthew decided that we could DEFINITELY cook it because after all...it is only potato pasta and we have cooked with potatoes before and cooked pasta before...how hard could it be? :) Australians have a strange affinity to pumpkin...so why not make pumpkin gnocchi...no problem.
We looked at 3 different grocery stores for nutmeg (called for in the recipe we had for gnocchi). Luckily the Google kitchen chef came to our aid and bested a small amount of nutmeg upon us and wished us luck in our endeavour. We needed more than luck as it turns out.
We decided that we could deviate a bit from the gnocchi recipe in how we cooked the potatoes and that we decided to make pumpkin gnocchi...not regular gnocchi (should have been our first big flag). The recipe said to bake the potatoes in the oven but since we were cooking the pumpkin in the oven and our oven is small, we decided to boil the potatoes. Little did we know that this was a bad idea. We also decided to cook a double recipe since we had so many potatoes. It is probably not the best plan to cook a double anything when doing truly experimental cooking...but since we had made pasta several times before, Matthew made the assertion that we would be fine.
Our first sign of trouble was when the dough had the consistency of pancake batter even after we had added all of the flour. We did not take this as a fail because we had made pasta before. So add more flour.
2 more cups of flour and we now had cookie dough. According to the resident expert of the house, pasta dough is dry and this was not it...we needed more flour. So add more flour.
One kilo bag (2.2 pounds) of flour later (3 times the amount called for in the recipe). AND since we had made pasta before, we knew there was a problem, it was still too sticky.
We aborted the effort to get the right consistency of dough and tried to cook some of them, trying to get something for dinner but deciding that we were not going to keep anything left over. Well...not shockingly, they tasted like flour and were pretty slimy (the recipe said that if they were slimy....we should add more flour...ha ha...we found that funny). The good news was that they sat like a lump in my tummy and so I did not feel hungry once we declared the dinner a fail.
I did something strange that night. I was so tired from cooking that day that we cleaned up the counters and cooking implements but left about a 4" ball of dough in the bowl to discard the next morning.
We were greeted with a surprise. Our dough had decided to escape. It made it up and consumed the bowl and was making a run for the counter. I approached carefully and when I touched it, it deflated a little bit. After Matthew left for work, I turned my attention back to it and I swear it had inflated and grown more. I decided to cook the thing as it smelled like sourdough, that and it would be a WHILE lot easier to throw out if it was solid. I was picturing a B movie and seeing it climb back up the trash chute and come smother us in the middle of the night. Turns out, it made a pretty good sourdough bread that made a killer french toast.
We have not tried gnocchi again yet...just because this loaf of bread was tamed, does not mean that the next one will not turn on us.
You will be relieved to know that we did use the pasta masters knowledge (even without a rolling pin) and made a great pumpkin pasta for lasagna and pumpkin bread for a great Italian dinner.
So one day I mentioned that I have had gnocchi recently and decided that if cooked well...it is good. Matthew decided that we could DEFINITELY cook it because after all...it is only potato pasta and we have cooked with potatoes before and cooked pasta before...how hard could it be? :) Australians have a strange affinity to pumpkin...so why not make pumpkin gnocchi...no problem.
We looked at 3 different grocery stores for nutmeg (called for in the recipe we had for gnocchi). Luckily the Google kitchen chef came to our aid and bested a small amount of nutmeg upon us and wished us luck in our endeavour. We needed more than luck as it turns out.
We decided that we could deviate a bit from the gnocchi recipe in how we cooked the potatoes and that we decided to make pumpkin gnocchi...not regular gnocchi (should have been our first big flag). The recipe said to bake the potatoes in the oven but since we were cooking the pumpkin in the oven and our oven is small, we decided to boil the potatoes. Little did we know that this was a bad idea. We also decided to cook a double recipe since we had so many potatoes. It is probably not the best plan to cook a double anything when doing truly experimental cooking...but since we had made pasta several times before, Matthew made the assertion that we would be fine.
Our first sign of trouble was when the dough had the consistency of pancake batter even after we had added all of the flour. We did not take this as a fail because we had made pasta before. So add more flour.
2 more cups of flour and we now had cookie dough. According to the resident expert of the house, pasta dough is dry and this was not it...we needed more flour. So add more flour.
One kilo bag (2.2 pounds) of flour later (3 times the amount called for in the recipe). AND since we had made pasta before, we knew there was a problem, it was still too sticky.
We aborted the effort to get the right consistency of dough and tried to cook some of them, trying to get something for dinner but deciding that we were not going to keep anything left over. Well...not shockingly, they tasted like flour and were pretty slimy (the recipe said that if they were slimy....we should add more flour...ha ha...we found that funny). The good news was that they sat like a lump in my tummy and so I did not feel hungry once we declared the dinner a fail.
I did something strange that night. I was so tired from cooking that day that we cleaned up the counters and cooking implements but left about a 4" ball of dough in the bowl to discard the next morning.
We were greeted with a surprise. Our dough had decided to escape. It made it up and consumed the bowl and was making a run for the counter. I approached carefully and when I touched it, it deflated a little bit. After Matthew left for work, I turned my attention back to it and I swear it had inflated and grown more. I decided to cook the thing as it smelled like sourdough, that and it would be a WHILE lot easier to throw out if it was solid. I was picturing a B movie and seeing it climb back up the trash chute and come smother us in the middle of the night. Turns out, it made a pretty good sourdough bread that made a killer french toast. We have not tried gnocchi again yet...just because this loaf of bread was tamed, does not mean that the next one will not turn on us.
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