February 7, 2011
What makes pizza, pizza? Is it the marinara sauce? The mozzarella cheese? The thick crust? In my mind, pizza is one of the most adaptable foods on the planet – you can play with just about every major component, which also makes it difficult to define.
This Winter en Suisse, I learned that you can have prosciutto and gruyère on pizza, with hardly any sauce at all. And in Zürich last weekend I went to a place where it’s perfectly ok to call it a tarte flambée instead of a pizza. But really, it’s any flat baked pie with toppings. The sauce, the crust, the toppings, all of them are totally variable options, simply waiting for your creative palate to guide the way.
January 28, 2011
Woohoo!! I did it! My first successful gluten free gnocchi, ever! I’ve made gnocchi in the past, thanks to the wonderful instruction found in a Marcella Hazan cookbook that my mother handed down to me. I’ve usually gotten great results with conventional gnocchi. I’ve attempted gluten free in the past too – in fact several times. Ricotta gnocchi work easily gluten free because the only flour is a mere dusting on the outside of the little dumplings. But every trial of potato gnocchi always ended in dismal failure, watching in sadness as my gnocchi dissolved away into nothingness in the simmering water. All that hard work cooking the potatoes, making the dough, rolling and cutting into those cute little gnocchi dumpling shapes, all gone to waste in about 30s of time in a pot on the stove. It was discouraging and depressing. In fact so much so that I haven’t even attempted gluten free potato gnocchi in over two years. Until now.
