gnocchi alla romana recipe
( vegetarian)

recipe by mb

the saga ... the drama ... the gnocchi ...

I had never heard of gnocchi alla romana before I saw this recipe, Gnocchi alla Romana with Sun-Dried Tomatoes, ( Super Natural Cooking, pages 104-105). They are large disks of pasta, covered with butter and parmesan cheese and baked until they're golden and crispy. Wowsers. At first glance the recipe seemed not only drool-inducing, but astoundingly simple too. I mean, there are only seven ingredients ... how hard could it be?

If you ever find yourself asking that question, beware. It's obviously a trap.

The first instructions in the recipe are to put 5½ cups of milk and ¾ cup finely chopped sun-dried tomatoes into a large saucepan over medium heat, simmering for a bit to allow to tomatoes to rehydrate. This is easy. I've simmered things before. No problem. Everything's going along swimmingly.

Now the recipe tells me to add 3 cups of semolina flour gradually, "mixing until it begins to pull away from the side of the pan." I'm not sure what this means at all because I never got to experience this "pulling away" from the side of the pan. I got 2 cups into the mixing when Darwin made a loud noise behind me. I turned around to look at him and when I turned back, the flour and milk mixture had tripled in size, like some kind of alien hell-bent on taking over my kitchen. There was no way that there was enough room for more flour in there, but I still had another cup left. Aaah!

Full steam ahead, I dumped the last cup of flour in all at once. This is where everything started going downhill very quickly. There wasn't enough room in the pot for more flour, so the last cup that I had just ended up sitting, completely dry, on the bottom of the pot. Somehow I convinced myself that this wasn't a big deal and I'd just incorporate it in the next step.

Now I was supposed to stir in ¼ cup of butter, ¾ cup of grated parmesan cheese, and 6 egg yolks. Or, to be more exact, to try really hard to stir it in. All the dry flour on the bottom of the pot seemed to have baked on by this point, so it just stayed dry stuff on the bottom. And the mixture on the top became extremely moist and sticky.

This was not how it was supposed to go, I could tell.

I let it sit to cool for about 10 minutes, but it still stayed damn hot. I think this is because the pot I was using was just too small, something I should have known when the milk/flour mixture tried to rise up and kill me.

Now Heidi says "put a layer of cold water on the countertop ... more of a glaze than a puddle" so that we can use that surface for spreading out the gnocchi dough. I've got to be honest here, this is more like a giant ball of sticky mess than dough, and adding any water to it seems like a pretty bad idea, but I give it a go. It's at this point that I reached down into my baking cabinet and realized that the circular cookie cutter I thought I had was just a figment of my imagination. I own three stars, a maple leaf, various Christmas-related ones, and a wolf howling at the moon ... but no cookie cutter that really screamed elegant gnocchi. So I formed the patties with my hands, quickly becoming covered in hot and sticky dough, burning my hands and rendering it almost impossible to form patties.

Did I mention that this is all happening while the thermostat in my apartment is on the fritz? And that the temperature in my kitchen is a glorious 90°? I'm dripping sweat all over the place, something which is pretty gross all the time, and truly disgusting in the kitchen.

And now I'm supposed to preheat the oven to 400°? Awesome. I'll be dead of heatstroke before dinnertime.

So now the last step before baking is to melt another ¼ cup of butter, drizzle it over the gnocchi, and then top the entire thing off with another ¼ cup of grated parmesan. Then bake it with a top on the dish for 25 minutes, remove the top, and bake for another 25.

Don't get me wrong here, this was very, very tasty. But it was so hot in my apartment and the dish itself was so hot and heavy that we pretty much had no interest in actually eating it.

Next time I'll just make salad.

So here are the lessons I learned:

• DO NOT COOK THIS WHEN YOUR APARTMENT IS TRYING TO ROAST YOU TODEATH!!!!! I can't stress that enough.

• Use a much larger pot than you think you need.

• Don't add the semolina flour gradually ... judging from my experience it should be put in quite quickly and then stirred like crazy to make sure everything gets incorporated before it swells up to the size of an elephant.

• I pretty much trust Heidi, but I don't know about this whole water glaze on the counter thing. I think next time I'd try flour instead of water.

• Make sure you have all your equipment in order before you get started, otherwise you could end up with wolf-shaped gnocchi.

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