Pasta La Vista

To start off the season of being thankful, I think it would be very appropriate for me to address a pasta that I am particularly thankful for. 

This pasta is quite different from the classic dough pasta, it is created from mashed potatoes. Being made out of mashed potatoes makes this pasta a very smooth and tasteful one to enjoy. If you haven’t guessed it by now, the spotlight for this week’s periodical is placed upon Gnocchi.The proper italian way to pronounce this pasta would be, ¨nyaw- kee.¨ However, if you’re American, you would commonly recognize it as being pronounced as ¨noh- kee¨ or ¨nok- ee.¨ 

In my opinion, Gnocchi has some of the most humorous stories that accompany it. Gnocchi with tomato sauce is known as strangolapreti or strangoloprevete, meaning priest stranglers, due to a local priest in Florence liking them so much, he ate them so fast, that he choked on them. If this story doesn’t show you how tasteful these little ¨knuckle¨ pastas are then I don’t know what will. 

My personal experience with Gnocchi was very interesting to say the least. When I purchased them, I had no knowledge that they were made of mashed potatoes and because of that, they would require to be refrigerated. So, I was a little weirded out that they came in a sealed bag that was in the fridge ile and not the pasta one. When I looked up recipes to refer from I was kind of confused to see that there was nothing complicated to any of them. Most of them had basically just garnish to add to the Gnocchi. I went ahead and took my own path and cooked them as instructed on the packaging and tasted them as they were. It honestly took my breath away with how different and how delicious they actually were. I highly recommend these if you want the true taste of Italian cuisine. Gnocchi is addicting and I can say that with complete certainty. Taste with caution and as always, don’t be an impasta.