Make anything with flour.

I’m taking a break from watching the new season of The Bachelorette (which might I add is the best reality show on TV; other than that, no comment) to put up some pictures of the ugliest sweet potato gnocchi (potato dumplings) possibly made in recent history, though to a bumbling idiot in the kitchen like me, they tasted pretty damn good.

  What I used:

• 4 medium-sized sweet potatoes (size of a tennis ball?)
• 2 cups of all-purpose flour, more or less
• 2 small eggs (or 1 large egg, but eggs in China are babies)
• 2 teaspoons basil (dried, powdered, or whatever)

First I put the sweet potatoes in boiling water for about 25 minutes. When they were softened throughout, I took them out of the water to be cooled, and easily peeled the skin off by hand.

Then I mashed the sweet potatoes with a wooden spoon. And added the egg(s). Oh, and why not sprinkle in some powdered basil while I’m at it? 

The hard part was next. Incorporating the flour into the mixture. I added the flour little by little and started kneading the whole mixture by hand, and things got a little messy:

How do I get this off?!?

In other gnocchi recipes, you’re supposed to incorporate the flour into the mixture until the whole thing is “just a little bit sticky,” and then roll out the sweet potato dough blob into 3/4 inch logs to be cut into little gnocchi pieces. 

Suffice it to say, my mixture never reached that point of “Just a little bit sticky.” Plus I wanted my gnocchi to be more sweet potato-y, for fear of using too much flour. I skipped the step of creating logs, instead making little ball shapes by hand. Well, that got really boring really quickly, and my hands were way too sticky. So I resorted to using teaspoons to individually spoon out 3/4 inch pieces of mixture onto cookie sheets.

Ugly sweet potato gnocchi!

I stuck the cookie sheets into the freezer for 20 minutes, until the gnocchi was hardened.

Boiled the gnocchi until they floated, and stuck them on the frying pan with a little olive oil, butter, garlic, and cheese.

I didn’t mind that the gnocchi wasn’t too chewy (I think it would’ve been moreso if I added more flour), though I think I need to work on a more suitable sauce for this. But I love that if there is too much gnocchi, you can just keep it in the freezer, to be thrown into boiling water next time. Eeeeasy!

Alright. Back to The Bachelorette.