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.

This is the pictoral account of our two-day baking extravaganza. Happy Birthday Will! I hope you enjoyed the cake(s). It took me a lot of willpower not to devour it all before the big dinner.

First, we made a Peanut Butter Chocolate Cake - oh I’m sorry, a two-layer Peanut Butter Cake with Chocolate-Peanut Butter Icing (recipe here: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Peanut-Butter-Cake-with-Chocolate-Peanut-Butter-Icing-2047). This one turned out looking and smelling reeeeaaally nice. We added some Nutella into the icing, too!

As you can tell, “we made” mostly means me taking pictures of the master at work :)

Next up, a simple chocolate cake (okay, made from mix) with Hannah’s homemade icing (butter, sugar, whipping cream, am I forgetting anything?).

Will is leaving us this Friday. Such is the expat life. We will miss you!!

16 super-easy recipes by Hannah, Darcie, and Justine. Now taking orders, for the low promotional price of 100 RMB! All proceeds go to Save the Ozone Layer in Shanghai Fund.

Lately, I spend maybe 57% of my time online looking at food. Not necessarily reading recipes, mind you, but dreaming about what I could be making if only I could get the right ingredients, without paying a small fortune.

Enough of that, I’m starting to modify all the recipes that I see so that they can be fit for a poorly-stocked kitchen (on a side note, thank goodness I have an oven, which most Chinese kitchens don’t). This morning, I did this with Everybody Likes Sandwiches’s Best Oatmeal Ever - Baked Oatmeal with Apples. I’m not a huge fan of super sweet breakfast foods, so I switched out the 3/4 cup of juice with 1 cup of water.

(original recipe here: http://everybodylikessandwiches.com/2008/09/best-oatmeal-ever-baked-oatmeal-with-apples/)

There are a million apples in my fridge, so I might as well put them to good use, right?

Ingredients

• 1 cup oatmeal
• 1 red apple, diced into 1/2 inch blocks?
• 1 cup whole milk
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons honey
• 1 cup water
• 1 tablespoon dessicated coconut
• 1 generous heap of pre-sliced almonds

Preheat oven to 175C (close enough to 350F). Mix everything together in a bowl. Pour mixture into casserole dish (if you have one, which I don’t), then bake for about 30-40 minutes, or until all of the liquid is absorbed. Serve with milk or spoon it directly out of the bowl like a hungry barbarian.   

Makes many servings.