Spinach Ricotta Gnocchi

HOLY SHIT THAT (this: http://www.elise.com/recipes/archives/007404spinach_ricotta_gnocchi.php) WAS AMAZING!

Pictures to come (though they don't look as good as the ones on the website with the recipe). So we did it. We made some Italian food from scratch that wasn't terrible! It was gnocchi, but using ricotta cheese rather than potato, which is apparently less difficult to mess up. The texture, though, was exactly no worse than the best gnocchi I've ever had (which, actually was a beet gnocchi at some swanky Italian joint in Williamsburg). This may be because I've just had and liked the ricotta variety in the past, but it doesn't matter. These were like biting, oh I'm too excited to come up with some appropriate metaphor. They rolled around in my mouth like little bugs of joy as I devoured them or something like that. Seriously, guys, I can't explain how good these are.

It's a messy, time and dish consuming process, though. Make sure that you're either feeding a lot of people or really want this meal a few times before making it. Z took care of the sauce, which a bit of melted goat cheese made quite delicious. I did the entire making the gnocchi process myself. I am normally awful with non-cookie flour-involving recipes. Furthermore the recipe demands a 'light touch' that I imagined would be even harder to pull off than it would have been to add copious breadcrumbs to tempeh hot-wings. Still, the fates had decided that this was my burden alone to bare, and bore it I did! Self-congratulation aside, though, it got to be fun after a while. You have to do a lot of rolling things into logs that Z thought looked like how asparagus feels. I realized while I was doing that why play-dough has the post-hyphen content that it does (well, maybe there isn't a hyphen in the actual name, I don't know.). Also fun was cutting the middle-finger diamtered tubes into 1 inch pillows with a fork. Z then put the awesome fork indentations into them. She seemed to think it was extraneous work, but it made them look much more awesome afterward, and probably made them cook better too.

In summary, I have never been so excited about a meal that I posted about it this quickly after consuming it. We have about another tray full of uncooked little guys to freeze for later. I can only hope they'll be as good!

PS, you can actually tasted the spinach too. It's very faint and you have to sort of dig around with your sensations, but it's there and that is a big pulse as far as I am concerned.