After all the crazy, off-the-cuff potato gnocchi-making I’ve engaged in this fall, I decided to branch out. To sweet potato gnocchi. It works pretty much the same as regular potato gnocchi, except the dough never took on that playdough quality and stayed quite soft/tender/flour-hogging. Part of the reason for that is that the sweet potato is an entirely different vegetables, I’m sure, but the fact that the sweet potatoes I used were gigantic and so I peeled and cut them in order to boil them surely didn’t help – they probably soaked up a fair amount of water while cooking. Next time I might try just roasting the sweet potatoes whole….

Due to pantry shortages, I used whole wheat pastry flour instead of all purpose flour. It worked great. I’ve found these two flours can be used completely interchangeably in almost any recipe. Still, that it worked so well in gnocchi sort of shocked me.

Sweet potato gnocchi

Easy as homemade gnocchi are, they aren’t as easy as pulling something out of the freezer, so I made a large batch – half to eat that night, half to freeze for future. The entire batch makes about eight reasonable servings, servings that leave me plenty full. That said, I really have no idea how much you eat. This “large” batch may be just the right amount for your family of four. Then again, you might find it serves 12. It also depends on how you serve them: Just coated with a bit of brown butter or doused in cheese sauce? Sauteed with a few veggies or topped with ragu?

Note: To freeze simply lay shaped gnocchi on a baking sheet in a single layer and put in the freezer for a few hours or overnight. Once frozen, transfer to an airtight container or ziploc bag. When you’re ready to cook them, just pop them in the boiling water. They’ll take a minute or two longer to cook than do the fresh ones.

2 lbs. sweet potatoes

1 Tbsp. salt (for cooking water)

2 – 2 1/2 cups whole wheat pastry flour or all-purpose flour, plus more for rolling and shaping

1 egg

Peel sweet potatoes and cut into even-sized pieces. Put sweet potato chunks in a large pot and cover with cool water. Bring to a boil, add salt, and cook until sweet potatoes are very tender when pierced with a fork (try to limit your check-ins, you don’t want them taking up even more water than they already will). Drain sweet potatoes and return to the still-hot pot. Put them back on the stove over low heat and shake to help evaporate excess water.

Mash sweet potatoes thoroughly. I find pushing them through a ricer is the best way, but a large fork or potato masher works just fine, too. Stir in 2 cups of flour, 1 cup at a time.

If you’re cooking a batch of gnocchi, bring a large pot of water to a boil. If you’re going to freeze all the gnocchi, bring a small saucepan of water to a boil. Drop a spoonful of the batter into the boiling water. Stir and then let cook, undisturbed, until the “dumpling” floats to the surface. Let it continue cooking for 30 seconds before fishing it out. If it holds together, proceed with the recipe without adding the egg. If it falls apart, stir in the egg. The dough will separate and look weird. Do not panic. Instead, keep stirring. The dough will come back together, I promise.

Stir in the final 1/2 cup flour if the dough seems wet. If it seems like you could, with well-floured hands on a very well-floured surface, roll the dough into snakes and cut it into dumplings, turn it out onto a very well-floured surface. Divide the dough into four parts. Working with one part at a time, roll it into a 1-inch-thick snake and cut it into 1/2-inch dumplings. I found the dough too soft to really shape on a fork as one does with traditional potato gnocchi, but if you want to give it a try I’d love to hear about it! Put cut gnocchi on well-floured baking sheets. Put any amount you want to freeze in the freezer. Any gnocchi you plan to cook the same day simply cover loosely and leave in a cool spot until you’re ready to cook them.

To cook the gnocchi, bring a pot of salted water to a boil and cook the gnocchi as described for the sample – add to boiling water, stir, and let boil until they float to the surface, then let them cook 30 seconds more before lifting out of the water. Only cook as many gnocchi as will fit in a single layer when they float to the surface. Keep cooked gnocchi warm in a low oven, with a bit of melted butter or whatever sauce you plan on serving them with. I chose browned butter with a bit of sage and a few toasted walnuts. It was a solid, if unimaginative option.

I realize, I really and truly do, that most of you are not going to make your own potato gnocchi. I can see that it seems daunting. It seems messy. It seems like a lot of work. I suppose it is all of those things, in a way. But it’s all relative, isn’t it? The daunting, the messy, the time-consuming – these are the kitchen projects I like the best. And, as my dad once said, “The homemade kind is always better.”

We were having some friends over and I was trying to keep things quite simple. It was just another couple and us – we were only hosting because we couldn’t find a sitter. (I have found that there are two types of people that work well as dinner party friends when you have a school-age kid – people with similar school-age kids and people without any children at all.) They insisted on bringing a starter and wine and dessert, claiming we always host because of the sitter issue. I didn’t even put up a fight but tried to figure out a meal that wouldn’t suck up my entire day but would also use some of the potatoes from our CSA that have piled up a bit in the fridge.

I was brainstorming with the family and Ernest suggested gnocchi. Daunting, messy, and time-consuming? Not really that much since I already had some pesto in the fridge I had made so all I had to do was make the dumplings – and I’ve done that before and, in the end, it doesn’t take that much time (fair warning: so says the person who loves to do things in the kitchen).

So I boiled a pound and a half of yukon gold potatoes, starting them in a pot of cold water, adding a tablespoon of salt once the water was boiling, and avoided pricking them to test for doneness too terribly much lest the potatoes get waterlogged.

I drained them, donned a latex glove to protect my hand from the heat as I scraped the skin off each hot potato.

They were then pushed through a ricer (my favorite way to mash potatoes thoroughly and completely) and mixed with one and a half cups of flour.

This dough, still warm from the boiled potatoes, feels a lot like playdough and is quite fun to work with. I divided it into four and rolled out each quarter into an inch-thick snake on a very well floured surface.

This potato dough snake was then cut into bite-size pieces (a table knife works fine and reminds me of pre-school).

So far so easy, right? Next, to make the dumplings gnocchi-shaped, I simply took each little knob of dough and ran in down the tines of a fork, pushing it with my thumb so it ends up with the tine marks on one side and the thumbprint on the other. It takes a few dumplings to get the hang of it, but once you’ve figured out the motion you can gnocchify an entire batch of dumplings in less than five minutes.

The gnocchi were then laid out on a very well floured tray, covered with a clean towel and sat, waiting patiently, for their big moment to arrive.

The stage was set: Two big pots of water brought to a boil. Serving platter in warm oven. Water salted. Pesto brought to room temperature. A bit of the pesto spread on the serving platter. Bite-size pieces of green bean thrown in the water and cooked a few minutes before being fished out with a slotted spoon and put on the serving platter.

Then the gnocchi were added – half to each pot of water (otherwise cook in two batches). They sank right to the bottom of the pot and got a swift yet decisive stir. After about a minute they floated to the top of the water as were allowed to cook for about 10 seconds while they floated and then, like the green beans before them, they were lifted out of the water and onto the serving platter. Once all the gnocchi were out, the pesto was added and everything tossed. The platter was brought – triumphant – to the table with parmesan and a grater for each person to top their own.

Has is becoming my habit, a recipe -style recipe for Potato Gnocchi is over at Local Foods. Oh, and there’s one there for Pesto, too.

Speaking of which… a friend told me she thought that recipe needed some “melty cheese.” I thought she was nuts. Cheesier? I thought, why that would make it too cheesey. Then I made it with the regular supermarket brand part skin ricotta, which was all they carried at the little market I stopped at, instead of whole milk ricotta…. Oh my. Yes. If you make it with part skim it definitely needs a little something something to keep the cheesey part from baking into crumbly dry bits. Um, some cream? Kind of defeats the “part skim” aspect of things, doesn’t it? I’m thinking that instead of parmesan you would need to use something softer, less aged, more melty. Fontina or a young pecorino. As for me and my future with this dish (and Ernest luvs it as much as I do, so it’s sticking around because while my dashing husband does not luv it he happily tolerates it even though it comes dangerously close to his much hated “casserole” – I know, I know, but please don’t tell him that it is, in fact, a casserole), I’ll be making the extra effort to buy the whole milk ricotta.

p.s. Remember that creamy spicy tomato sauce from the other night? It ends up that if you let it cool down to room temperature it makes a delicious dip. Dee-li-cious. My dashing husband and I stood around dipping cauliflower florets into it and trying to figure out if it was weird or if you could actually just serve it as a dip. We decided you woudl never guess it wasn’t a dip. Go forth! Dip!

Yep, that’s my nightmare. Right there. A giant crowd. Just huge. There was a soap box derby race at Dolores Park in San Francisco yesterday. Since my dashing husband is out of town, I felt the need to keep Ernie busy and distracted this weekend. So I did the very last thing I wanted to do because I thought he’d like it: I took him to the race. Even though I knew it would be crowded. Even though I knew it was likely to resemble a street fair. Even though it was one of the prettiest days of the year and I knew that meant the crowd would be even more huge and street-fair-like than I originally thought.

There were two things keeping this plan on track: first, we can walk there; second, my cousin Katie was going to join us. So we went, we fought the crowds, Katie carried Ernest on her shoulders, we saw a few cars (a doughnut, a shark, a log), and Ernie begged to go home. “It’s too loud, Mama,” he said. Whether it’s nature or nurture at work there, he is just like his parents.

So what does this have to do with dinner, you ask? Well, after all the “fun” and sun, I was in no mood to cook much. But we were hungry come dinner time. And maybe even in need of a wee bit of comfort. Ricotta chard gnocchi to the rescue! Wait, don’t stop reading internets! I’m not suggesting that whipping up some homemade ricotta gnocchi with chard in them is a quick and easy dinner. I’m suggesting tossing packaged gnocchi with ricotta and chard makes a quick one-dish supper.

Ricotta chard gnocchi

1 big bunch chard (I prefer Swiss, but red was used in the dish above and rainbow or golden works just dandy as well)

1 500 gram/1.1 lb. package gnocchi

About 1 cup ricotta

Parmesan

Salt, pepper, a bit of butter

Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Meanwhile cut out the stems of the chard leaves (make a “v” to get a fair amount of the stem). Chop stems and set aside. Cut leaves and set aside. Do not set them aside together. We don’t want them fighting.

Add salt to make the boiling water salty. Add chopped stems. Cook until almost tender. Add gnocchi and chard leaves. Cook until gnocchi is tender (usually about 2 or 3 minutes–look on the package). Drain throughly, put in a large bowl and toss with the ricotta. Add salt and pepper to taste. Butter a baking pan (8×8 works, but slightly larger is better–I use a 9×12 Spanish casseula, but a gratin dish works well too), put gnocchi in it, sprinkle with plenty of freshly grated parmesan. Broil until brown and crispy on top. Serve to happy campers.

I also made another round of caraway red cabbage. What else can you do with red cabbage? That tastes good? Please, help me help myself make something else.

(You’re not the only one to whom this menu sounds familiar. Ernie asked where the potatoes were.)