The Eat-Cute: Spinach Gnocchi and Vanilla Meringues

Meet-cute: Scenario in which two individuals are brought together in some unlikely, zany, destined-to-fall-in-love-and-be-together-forever sort of way (the more unusual, the better). (via Urban Dictionary)

Eat-cute: Scenario in which two Yukon Gold potatoes meet my monkey peeler. 

Potatoes - Prepare to be peeled!!!

And thus started a recipe for Spinach Gnocchi (via the Herbs and Spices Cookbook).

Once the potatoes met their final destination in the hands of my monkey henchman, they got diced up to do some hard time in Boiling Water State Prison.

Meanwhile, some spinach sweated it out and got pureed:

 

The recipe called for passing the spinach through a sieve, but I figured the spinach had gone through enough abuse at this point (and if you read my entry on the tamarind, I'd had enough of it too). 

Added some browned butter, flour, egg yolks, and spices: 

Then all of these met up at the behest of my potato masher. 

Now the hands-on part (thinking back to my play-doh days) of rolling the gnocchi came next. Since I was making little balls of gnocchi dough, I couldn't very well take pictures with my phone, so alas you will just have to imagine how that went. But I can tell you it did involve a lot of flour flying everywhere and sticky fingers and a bit of cursing. The directions in the cookbook were unfortunately quite vague as to the proper mixing and rolling technique. Next time I will consult the Internets before rolling gnocchi again. Sorry I missed you this time, Internets. Here's the end product, a plate of little potato balls: 

Remember when I said I only used egg yolks for this? Well if you were tricky, you might have wondered, "what about the egg whites?" This is where the serendipitous part of the Eat Cute comes into play. I used exactly 3 egg yolks...and 3 egg whites are exactly what you need to make a batch of Vanilla Meringues! Could that have worked out better? Meringues are super easy and don't take that many ingredients (which is great for me, because I always seem to be out of something). 

Mixing it all up with my super-vintage stand mixer: 

I then got all fancy with my pastry bag (which I used for the first time). The messiness there was rivaled only by my gnocchi adventure, so it was either a meringue-covered phone or no pictures. Only 3 egg whites makes two trays full of cookies! I challenge you to make a cheaper batch of cookies. Really. 

After 1.5 hours of baking and 1 hour of cooling (in the oven)..

NOM NOM!