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| The Tucci Table |
My daughter Stephanie bought this cookbook on a trip to Colorado. She gave it to me the following Christmas because it's signed, and she knows I'm a Stanley Tucci fan. I decided to make the Gnocchi with Sage Butter. RJ didn't seem crazy about using sage, but he does love gnocchi. I shopped for the ingredients and I only needed 1.5 lbs of potatoes, parmesan cheese, butter, flour, sage leaves, and eggs.
Mistake #1. I'm not sure why I thought we needed the 20 lb bag of potatoes from Costco. The potatoes were huge, like the size of small cats. As I have mentioned, I am famous for using too much of something in recipes. For some reason I thought 6 cat sized potatoes would be 1.5 lbs. Um, no, it was more like 6 lbs., and I realized that after I had boiled them. It was supposed to take 20 minutes to cook the potatoes, but because they were so huge it took 40 even though I had cut them into quarters. What was I going to do with all the extra potatoes? I decided I would just double the gnocchi recipe. That was Mistake #2.
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| Mashed potatoes |
The recipe has you boil the potatoes with the skin on, then "gently" peel the skin off afterward. There was no "gently", it was a battle. I wished I had just peeled them first, Mistake #3. Next, use a potato ricer to mash the potatoes, which I don't have. I used a potato masher, and piled my enormous pile of mashed not riced potatoes on the counter.
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| Adding the ingredients |
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| Finally the dough! |
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| Gnocchi |
I made a well in the center and added my eggs. Since I was doubling, it should have been 2 whole eggs and 2 egg yolks. But I screwed up one of the eggs I was separating, and ended up with 3 eggs and 1 yolk. Mistake #4, and at this point I was afraid I would be there all night. I also added the olive oil, salt, flour and parmesan, and attempted to mix in with a fork to make a dough. This did not happen. It was more like a giant sticky mess. Mistake # 5. The recipe says to keep adding flour, so I added flour for what seemed like 3 days. I did eventually end up with some kind of dough.
To make the gnocchi, I rolled out the dough into a long sausage shape and cut every 1/4 inch. This wouldn't have been so bad if I didn't have to make a million of them. The gnocchi was easy to cook. Drop them in boiling water. They sink first, and then float when they are done. Again, this would not have been so bad if I didn't have to cook 1 million gnocchi.
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| The finished gnocchi |
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| Yum!! |
The sage butter was also super easy. Melt butter, add sage leaves, toss in gnocchi. Add parmesan, salt and pepper. 5+ mistakes later, RJ said they were really good, and he even seemed to like the sage butter. It wasn't as strong tasting as I thought it would be. Somehow the gnocchi ended up being fluffy pillows of potato goodness. I really don't know how that happened. Of course we had a ridiculous amount of leftovers, and the next day I made homemade tomato sauce. Next time I will use 2 cat sized potatoes, instead of 6.
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| Leftover the next day with homemade tomato sauce |
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