Supermeow!

So! My husband is out of town for a bachelor party in the woods (the indoor kids rented a cabin in the Poconoes so that they can stay inside playing video and board games, makes sense, I guess), so that means it’s time to roll out food that he hates. Food that he hates includes, in no order: tomatoes, cucumbers, mushrooms, quinoa, just about any fruit, and I think that’s it. He once told me that he preferred artificial cherry flavor to real cherry flavor. But you know what? I still love him, even if his palette is sometimes the palette of a ten-year-old. Happy Anniversary!

Anyhow, I made something that I actually don’t think he’d hate: I made plantain gnocchi and I did a pretty terrible job! From execution to photography, I managed to really botch this.

Actually, that’s not entirely true: while they don’t look that appetizing, they taste pretty good. I remember reading about a restaurant week special that involved plantain gnocchi and thought that it sounded really tasty. Apparently, Bergamot in Boston makes some great plantain gnocchi, too. Searching online yielded sweet recipes and an eggless savory that I decided to try (eggless because I recently discovered that two years of heavy steroid usage has resulted in me having high cholesterol… d’oh! Regardless of the cause, all solutions are the same, and that’s cutting bad fat the hell out of the diet).

So! I had three yellowy (sweet) plantains. I boiled them for 10 minutes, and then I put them through my potato ricer. To this, I added 1 ½ cups white whole wheat flour, and then I got to kneading. And kneading. And kneading. Then I decided “screw this” and I added an egg. You be quiet, inner voice of my personal trainer, it needed the egg and that one egg’s been distributed across like 50-60 gnocchi (I didn’t count). I boiled them for 4 minutes each, and voila! Gnocchi!

They’re not really that, uh, blue-cast. Never you mind. I thought hey, what tastes great on tostones? Adobo seasoning! You know else Adobo seasoning tastes good on? Plantain gnocchi!

I ate a couple with a bit of olive oil and some sour cream (hey, sometimes if you get plantains at a Mexican restaurant, they give you sour cream/crema on the side). Then I remembered, duh, I also had some garlic scape pesto.

Silly me! I had made this a couple of weeks ago after I found garlic scapes at the Harvard U. farmers’ market and wondered “What does one do with garlic scapes?” The answer: make pesto! I swapped walnuts for almonds, but otherwise stayed true to the recipe. I think I underdid it with oil, though. Ah well.

I have some other stuff that I plan to make, and I want to write about my quinoa adventures, but there is some Law & Order: SVU that desperately, desperately needs me to watch it. Another day! Ta-ta, friends!