Quick Ass Gnocchi

Okay, discount the salt here. Seriously, you just need the mashed potato flakes, water, and flour. That's all. Any recipe with that few ingredients is a-okay in my book. Wes and I have been talking for a loooong time about trying gnocchi but kept not bothering. This was too easy for us to make excuses anymore. If you'd like to give it a try, I used the Quick Gnocchi Recipe from AllRecipes.com.

The first step is to make the mashed potatoes with less water than usual, basically. Wes got us garlic mashed potatoes, and they smelled freaking amazing. We knew we'd made the right call not getting plain.

Once that cooled down, I floured down the counter and started adding flour to the mashed potatoes to stiffen up the batter. This is where I made the one error of the process. I used too little flour. I let it be a bit too soft. So when in doubt, add a touch more flour. It wasn't a disaster, but it's something I will do differently next year.

 Pike thought that rolling the gnocchi was really fun, so he helped me out. Some of them may have been slightly squishy because of that, but it was well worth it. I used to cook with my mom in the kitchen, so it makes me very happy being able to do the same with him.

We had doubled the recipe, so we used a big old pot to boil the gnocchi because, frankly, I was too lazy to do a bunch of batches. For realz. They boiled quickly, then floated to the top, and I skimmed them off. Done! We also made some olive oil-coated sourdough garlic bread (shoutout to my bestie, the day old bread rack at Kroger). For sauce we warmed some canned four cheese sauce and threw in leftover crockpot chicken to add some extra protein.

This was the finished project. Like I said, I used a tiny bit too little flour, so they were softer than normal, but they still tasted pretty fantastic. All in all it was a hit with all of us, and we'll definitely be trying it again. Yay for cooking experiments! What have you tried out lately?