I’ve always wanted to try my hand at homemade pasta. It always seems to show up as a challenge in cooking competition shows (my number 1 semi-guilty pleasure), and it seems like the perfect mix of daunting and rewarding. What better time to give it a go than on a day that looked like this?:
I decided on gnocchi because I don’t have any sort of pasta roller and because if I had it my way the key food groups would be potatoes, pasta, coffee, and cheese, and this hit 3 out of the 4 of them. One of my favourite food blogs, Smitten Kitchen, suggested using a regular grater in lieu of a potato ricer, which turned out to be useful advice given that my sister took the potato ricer with her to college.
I’ve had gnocchi before that was very dense or doughy, but I was very pleased by the way these turned out. I chose to make a butter sauce using thyme rather than a marinara or pomodoro tomato sauce so that I could cook the gnocchi in a pan after boiling them for a little bit of texture and crunch. They could’ve been a bit prettier – I’ll have to work on those fork-ridges – but of course, it’s the taste that really matters.
The weather’s meant to be back to warm and sunny tomorrow, but I’ll definitely be trying to make fresh pasta again the next bad-weather day.
Continue reading “Homemade potato gnocchi with butter-thyme sauce.”
This past weekend, while half of the students in my program were in Granada (I’m going this upcoming weekend!), and my roommate was in Paris, I took off on my own for the north: to Bilbao and San Sebastián. After deciding that Vueling is definitely my favourite low-cost airline (they let you have a carry-on and a purse! Anyone who has ever flown Ryanair knows what a big deal this is), I took a bus to San Sebastián and I immediately fell in love with the city! The walk from the bus station to the hostel was along a river and crossed a bridge just before it reached the ocean. The hostel I stayed in, 
thebestpossibletime 