Gnocchi and Pork

Gnocchi oh Gnocchi.  You sound so delicious and easy to make on paper, oh so freaking difficult to make in practice.  Every time I've tried to make gnocchi up to this point its been EPICFAIL time, like why I do I even cook level of fail.  It's really quite embarrassing.  Needless to say this dish intimidated the hell out of me.  So let's see how it all worked out.

The stuff you need for the gnocchi.  Note to my father who wanted to argue with me that gnocchi is a pasta.  This picture proves it ain't a pasta, the primary ingredient is potato, not flour like pasta.  The sum total of the ingredients is flour, egg, Parmesan, potatoes, salt, and olive oil.

I first chopped up the potatoes and slid them into a pot of boiling water.  Normally, once the potatoes are cooked in the water you would throw them back into the pan over the heat to dry them out.  I decided to follow the recipe and throw them into the oven to dry them out.  It's a novel idea but I'll probably stick with the hot pan on the stove. 

Once the potatoes were done, they went into a bowl with ONLY A SMALL AMOUNT OF FLOUR DAD  (I'm not bitter or anything) the egg, cheese and oil to form a dough. 

I then portioned out about half of the dough and then rolled out small logs and then chopped them up to form the little pillows (gnocchi means pillow in italian) and then was the result.

With the gnocchi portion of the evening complete time for the topping.  Here we have pork, flour, garlic, butter, rosemary, red chilli flakes, broccoli, salt, chicken broth, pepper and marsala.

The first step was to cook off the pork.  The pork chop was seasoned and then coated in flour and sauteed.

The broccoli was steamed/sauteed in the sherry and chicken broth mixture until they were cooked all the way through. 

I then sliced the pork thin and added it to the sauce until everything was heated through.

 The first step to cooking the gnocchi is the boil it like you would pasta (yes the cooking method is similar but it still ain't pasta dad).  You cook it until it floats, and this is where I'd messed up before because my versions had never floated.  This one actually did (I may have done a little dance around the kitchen when I saw that it was working, or not).  Now that the gnocchi had been cooked through it was time to crisp them up in some butter.

The gnocchis now have a bit of browning on them.

The final plate, initially I was disappointed with the plating but the more I see this picture the more I actually like it.  This was a really fun dish to make and I"m so glad I finally successfully made gnocchi.  Thankfully there are three more gnocchi dishes coming over the next month, and I can't wait to dive in.