Gnocchi!
An antidote to the depressing state of the world right now: cooking lessons
In 2023, I tagged along with my husband to a conference at a resort in a rural, mountainous part of Tuscany. It’s an ideal place for a conference because the location is so remote that the participants have nothing else to do. It’s not like having a conference in, say, London or Paris.
On the other hand, it’s not the most scintillating environment for hangers-on looking for excitement. Fortunately I didn’t tag along for excitement: I was looking forward to quiet time to write. But the resort offered cooking classes, and I was eager to exorcise the memory of the last Italian cooking class I’d taken.1
It turned out that the resort classes were only offered for four or more students. Lucky for me, my husband’s colleagues turned out to be as interested in learning to make pasta and tiramisu as they were in sharing data about metabolomics.
The course was a blast, so much so that when Dave asked if I wanted to come to Padova with him in October for another conference, I said yes because I knew I’d be able to take another cooking course. Even better, one of my classmates from Tuscany, Helen, was coming to Padova and she was game to join me — as long as we learned to make gnocchi.
I had made gnocchi years ago and wasn’t a fan. I was more interested in pizza. Helen and I compromised: I found a teacher, Francesco, who was willing to teach us to make gnocchi and pizza. He runs a cooking school in Padova, but the school was full that week so Helen and I met him in an apartment that he owns, and we learned to make authentic Italian dishes in his kitchen.
I returned from Padova on Oct. 20, eager to put my newfound skills to work, but the bedbug infestation2 kept me out of my kitchen for nearly a month. On November 19, I finally got around to making gnocchi.
Just as in the class, I had no trouble mixing the dough, but I couldn’t get the hang of perfecting the shape. Francesco had made it look very easy: he’d just rolled the little noodles off a fork or a grater. I’d struggled in his kitchen and I struggled in mine. But the taste was just right. Instead of boiling the gnocchi, I pan fried them in a little bit of olive oil with broccolini, and then served them with toasted pine nuts and freshly grated parmesan cheese.
The recipe makes enough for eight people, and I put half of the dough back in the fridge and made more the next night, because it’s a time-consuming process and I didn’t have the time (nor was I feeding eight people).
For Christmas, my daughter presented me with a gnocchi-making tool. The official name is “gnocchi and garganelli paddle.”
I have no idea what garganelli is, but I was hoping that the tool would turn me into a gnocchi-shaping expert. The week after Christmas, I decided to make gnocchi again. The daughter of my friends Maxine and Chris was home from Vancouver, where she’s earning her PhD in microbiology, and she was eager to cook with me. Sarah is 25, a passionate foodie, and I loved cooking with her. She’s got a good sense of humor, she’s fun, and she’s confident and capable in the kitchen.
Also, she was happy to shape the gnocchi while I got going on the sauces. And she was a master. Her gnocchi were picture-perfect.
We served the pasta two ways: baked with tomato sauce and cheese, and pan-fried atop broccoli with pine nuts and cheese. The general consensus was that the baked one tasted better, though I liked them both.
Last weekend I had another impromptu gnocchi-making party for three friends, one of whom, Debby, likes to cook as much as Sarah and I do. We had a great time — and Debby had no qualms about shaping the gnocchi. Once again, I was happy to have someone else do that job.
Meanwhile, I did the cooking. I boiled half the gnocchi and served it baked with cheese and tomato sauce. This time I pan-fried the other half with spinach — and that one proved more popular. Different palates, different preferences. The one constant I’ve concluded during my three recent gnocchi-making sessions: the best way to make it is with friends, and the best way to eat it is together.
Thank you, as always, for reading. I am so grateful to all of you, and I hope you’ll keep coming back to read my weekly posts.
To those of you willing and able to pay my $35-a-year subscription fee (and those of you who pay even more), I offer a special shout-out — and also the gnocchi recipe. I’ll publish it separately this weekend, along with videos from the cooking class.
I wrote about it here:
I wrote about that here:
I’d rather eat them than cook them. Yours are beautiful. I wanted to dig in.
Nom, nom! Sounds like a wonderful adventure in Tuscany. And bringing it home to share with friends with this new found gnocchi gadget is sweet.