Once, many years ago I made potato gnocchi, because I desired their deliciousness. And they were yummy, but I swore to myself that I would never make them again. Why? Because unless you plan to spread your meal preparation over two days, it takes several hours to produce the meal, and it is really a lot of work during the entire process. It isn’t a couple hours of work where you can just walk away and check on things occasionally, it is constant cooking activity. I had decided that no matter how good they were when I was finished, I would not go down this path a second time.
And then…
I was out and about with a coworker and some of his friends, one of whom turns out to be a big shot marketing executive for a restaurant chain. She was mentioning how they were going to be adding gnocchi for a limited time in the upcoming season. All of us present, quite intoxicated, began professing our love of gnocchi, and my mouth started to water thinking of it. Ever since that night, I have been craving those little potato dumplings, and today I caught myself looking through cookbooks trying to determine what kind of sauce would be the best to go with them.
I’ve eliminated any tomato based sauces as I am a little bored with them right now, but I am also not a fan of white cream sauces. I’ve been toying with an orange cream sauce that I made once, which was absolutely delicious, but the flavor is vague enough in my memories that I am not sure. In my searching I came across a delightful looking recipe for linguine with scallops in an orange sauce, and now I am wondering if I could combine gnocchi with that or if that would be overkill; distracting too much from the scallops.
Well, there is really only one way to find out, and if I actually finish this shopping list I will have kissed the rest of my day goodbye.
UPDATE: Picked up the ingredients and whatnot, but I think I will have to wait on the gnocchi. I think it would really over do everything, and if I make those dumplings I won’t be able to eat until ten at night or so. I think I’ll save everything up and make a day of it tomorrow to produce a nice meal. After all the shopping and organizing I really just don’t feel like cooking. :)
Post-cooking: I tried the basic scallops & linguine in orange sauce and it really didn’t work for me. It was okay, but I like an orange sauce to be much thicker/creamier than the recipe I used produces. I’ll try to think of some ways to fix it, but this experiment goes in the “Well, at least I learned something” pile.
It reminds me of a saying my dad taught me whenever he and I were working on something together. “This should work. And if it doesn’t, we will always think it should have.”