Instant mashed potato "gnocchi"

with bolognese and garlic toast

Tonight’s dinner was gnocchi made from instant mashed potatoes and ricotta, tossed around in meaty bolognese, served alongside a piece of garlic toast.

Seeing as I studied writing at a public ivy league university, I was recently asked to develop an important investigative report analyzing different brands of instant mashed potato. With the current political climate in mind, I thought there was no time better than now to lend my thoughts to this pressing issue, which required me going to a few grocery stores and buying, cooking, and eating 7 brands of potato.

You’ll have to wait to read that future Pulitzer prize-winning piece of journalism, but for now I can tell you the aftermath of the taste test is that I have a lot of instant mashed potatoes to deal with/eat. Something I’ve been enjoying making in recent months is homemade gnocchi. It’ requires two ingredients (potato and flour), a bit of mixing with your hands, no precise pasta shaping skills, and they take 4 minutes to cook.

I’ve thought for a while about what they might be like made with instant mashed potatoes (instead of boiling/baking/passing potatoes through a ricer/sieve). They would have been good if I had made them correctly, but this was a case of me kind of messing something up in the kitchen, and actually having to pay the consequences of just winging it all the time.

I hydrated the potato flakes with mostly ricotta + a little bit of water, but I didn’t want to overwork them. I added some salt and a bit of flour, mixing gently so as not to develop the potatoes too much and make them gluey.

I rolled out the dough into a log, cut it in half, and then rolled the two halves into smaller logs. The annoying part about this is that I had a poppy seed bagel for breakfast, and obviously I didn’t clean the counter, so I got some poppy seeds in my gnocchi and nothing in life could be worse.

I cut off little nubbins from the logs and tossed them all on a baking sheet dusted with some flour. I defrosted a pint of bolognese I had made on my cookbook shoot like 2 weeks ago, and John let his skill set shine by bringing a pot of water to boil.

I instantly knew the gnocchi didn’t have enough binding by the fact that they started to break apart slightly in the boiling water, but I tried to be chill about it. I was barely able to move them around in the pan of bolognese for fear of turning them into just mashed potatoes. It was a rational fear, because that’s kinda what happened.

Hoping to add some textural contrast, I put some bread in the air fryer (no, we don’t have a toaster), and rubbed it with a garlic clove to make garlic bread. Voila! And if you think I’m the kind of person who looks down on Texas Toast, you couldn’t be more wrong. Texas Toast belongs in the food hall of fame.

Covered in parm and drizzled with oil, it all was tasty enough, but wasn’t what I had hoped for. John, of course, the simple angel, was pleased with the meal, and smiled at me for most of dinner.

For dessert I made chocolate pudding, which is much easier and faster than you’d think. I whisked unmeasured amounts of sugar, salt, some cornstarch, milk, an egg yolk, and cocoa powder in a saucepan over medium heat until the cornstarch hit that magic temperature and immediately thickened. Off the heat, I added a bit more milk to cool it down slightly, then mixed in a splash of Kahlua, vanilla, nutmeg, cinnamon, and cardamom.

After a bit more stirring, I added some chocolate chips and 2 pats of butter before I put it in the freezer to cool. After a delightful chat with my friend Graceann (hi Graceann), it was chilled and ready to enjoy - alone - as John was already falling asleep at 9 pm while playing video games.