Home Week 10

Week of March 22-28, 2020

This week, I decided to bring a little bit of Rome back home. My family has heard so much about the food and experiences that I have had abroad, so I figured that it was about time that I gave them a taste of what I was talking about. In other words, I learned how to make gnocchi!!

Potato noodles are my personal favorite, and my family buys them (though they’re admittedly frozen from Sam’s Club) often. My Italian grandmother makes them for family dinners all the time, but her recipes are impossible to follow- and invisible. Standing just tall enough to see over a pot on the stove, she uses her hands to weigh out and measure the ingredients. She claims that “you can feel when it’s right.” I don’t think that this gift has passed as smoothly down the family tree, but I was determined to find out. 

I started by peeling and boiling four large potatoes, mashing them with some butter, and adding flour and an egg. After mixing together for several minutes with a spoon, I took the forming dough out and began kneading by hand. This took me a good 10-15 minutes to get the correct consistency. Then I rolled the dough into a ‘snake,’ cut off half-inch pieces and pushed the doughballs up against a fork to give them their signature pattern. I made two batches of dough (because I have a big family), and I just repeated this process again to make a second group of noodles. I froze them and then boiled them for dinner the next night with a vodka sauce and sautéed garlic and mushrooms. 

My family really appreciated the time and effort it took me to make them dinner. I came to the new-found appreciation of Italians and their cuisine- this took a lot of hard work. Eating some fresh gnocchi made me Rome-sick, but also made me feel grateful that I can share my love for the Eternal City even when I’m quarantined thousands of miles away. With a few ingredients, the Luca family went back to our roots.