This is what passes as exotic at casa mfb: onion gnocchi with carrot sauce. I didn't trust the carrot sauce. My only experience with anything like a carrot sauce was this ginger carrot soup someone made. It wasn't really my favorite--very sweet. This turned out to be really good, though.
So, gnocchi is pretty simple. Dice two potatoes, boil until soft. Dice half an onion and put it in a pan with some olive oil and maybe half a teaspon of baking soda; sautee until mushy and brown. The baking soda greatly speeds the browning process--same thing as the pretzel dough I mentioned earlier, essentially. You can sautee onions alone for forty five minutes or an hour, or you can sautee them for about ten minutes with a dash of baking soda and get better results. Anyway, throw these into the food processor along with the potatoes and let the food processor run until the whole thing is goop. Pour the goop into a mixing bowl and start adding flour until you have a dough you can work with. It should be dry enough not to stick to your hands, wet enough to hold its shape without crumbling. Oh, and salt it to taste--not too salty, but enough to give it some flavor.
Roll your dough into a tube about as thick as your thumb, then chop it into lengths about as long as your first thumb knuckle. Take a fork and dent one side of them. Once all of your dough-thumbknuckles are ready, boil some water. Only after you've got it at a nice boil, drop a handful of dough-thumbknuckles at a time into the water. Scoop them out with a slotted spoon as soon as they start to float; it should take less than thirty seconds or so, and you really don't want to overboil them or they get mushy. Once they're out, they're ready to eat.
Now, the carrot sauce. I used two or three regular carrots and three or four puny little carrots--maybe a quarter of a bag, total, but we ended up with maybe 30% more sauce than we actually needed. Dice them and sautee them in butter until they start to get soft. It took maybe twenty minutes to half an hour, for me. Keep them stirred so they don't stick and burn. Once they're soft, put them in the food processor with a large pinch of dill and a medium pinch of cumin. Start the food processor, and then start adding chicken stock until you reach the optimum point of a) volume of sauce desired and b) consistency of sauce desired.
Once it's done, you'll probably want to nuke it for thirty seconds to warm it up. Ideally, the last of the gnocchi should just be coming out of the water when the sauce is done.
The result is just... good. Like, really good, and filling. The onions give the gnocchi an almost pierogi flavor, and the carrot sauce is nice and savory while still retaining a little bit of sweetness--just enough to be part of the flavor, not overwhelming like I'd worried.
So, gnocchi is pretty simple. Dice two potatoes, boil until soft. Dice half an onion and put it in a pan with some olive oil and maybe half a teaspon of baking soda; sautee until mushy and brown. The baking soda greatly speeds the browning process--same thing as the pretzel dough I mentioned earlier, essentially. You can sautee onions alone for forty five minutes or an hour, or you can sautee them for about ten minutes with a dash of baking soda and get better results. Anyway, throw these into the food processor along with the potatoes and let the food processor run until the whole thing is goop. Pour the goop into a mixing bowl and start adding flour until you have a dough you can work with. It should be dry enough not to stick to your hands, wet enough to hold its shape without crumbling. Oh, and salt it to taste--not too salty, but enough to give it some flavor.
Roll your dough into a tube about as thick as your thumb, then chop it into lengths about as long as your first thumb knuckle. Take a fork and dent one side of them. Once all of your dough-thumbknuckles are ready, boil some water. Only after you've got it at a nice boil, drop a handful of dough-thumbknuckles at a time into the water. Scoop them out with a slotted spoon as soon as they start to float; it should take less than thirty seconds or so, and you really don't want to overboil them or they get mushy. Once they're out, they're ready to eat.
Now, the carrot sauce. I used two or three regular carrots and three or four puny little carrots--maybe a quarter of a bag, total, but we ended up with maybe 30% more sauce than we actually needed. Dice them and sautee them in butter until they start to get soft. It took maybe twenty minutes to half an hour, for me. Keep them stirred so they don't stick and burn. Once they're soft, put them in the food processor with a large pinch of dill and a medium pinch of cumin. Start the food processor, and then start adding chicken stock until you reach the optimum point of a) volume of sauce desired and b) consistency of sauce desired.
Once it's done, you'll probably want to nuke it for thirty seconds to warm it up. Ideally, the last of the gnocchi should just be coming out of the water when the sauce is done.
The result is just... good. Like, really good, and filling. The onions give the gnocchi an almost pierogi flavor, and the carrot sauce is nice and savory while still retaining a little bit of sweetness--just enough to be part of the flavor, not overwhelming like I'd worried.
ink_addicted:
Gnocchi sound really good. Never heard that bit about the baking soda before. I'll have to try that. I too am skeptical about the carrot sauce. Not my favorite veggi. But those gnocchi could work with any sauce really.