Good afternoon! I have had another day of cooking lessons, and this time I learned how to make gnocchi! Here’s how it went.

Clueless about what gnocchi (NAH-kee) is? It’s sort of a potato-pasta dish, although you can make it without potato. Here’s a picture:

Gnocchi was first made in Rome. The Romans made their gnocchi with eggs mixed with a porridge-like dough, and similar forms are found today. The French like theirs made with choux pastry served with Béchamel sauce. The gnocchi I made was potato gnocchi, which included potato. How did I make it? Well, I started with my ingredients: a potato, an egg, some flour, and some nutmeg. First, we boiled the potato. Then we peeled off the skin, and we were supposed to rice it with a food ricer, which is a grater for foods besides cheese. We didn’t have one, so we had to use a colander! It didn’t work out too well. Then we mixed our grated potato with the egg, nutmeg, and flour. When we mixed it, it made a dough substance. We took a little blob of it, and dropped it into the boiling water. When you make gnocchi, you need to drop a piece in boiling water, to make sure it won’t fall apart. If it does fall apart, add a little more flour. Ours were good, so we shaped ours into tiny sausage shapes and dropped them into water to cook. Then it was time to feed our friends!

We served up our gnocchi with tomato sauce on plates. Four friends, plus me and my instructor. We had enough to feed one plate to each friend, and we still had a tiny bit left over. We used it to make a big pile in the middle of the table, so that everyone could help theirselves. I had some as well. It was quite delicious!

Well, that’s the end of today’s lecture about gnocchi! Check out my other posts, and feel free to post a comment! And Randall, thanks for being the best culinary instructor ever!

Good morning! Today I’d like to expand on something I talked about in a previous article, which was Georges Auguste Escoffier in my culinary museum post. For those of you who’d like to know more about him, you’re in for a treat!

Escoffier was born on October 28 1846, in France. When he turned 13, he started working at his uncle’s restaurant in Nice. He later moved to a restaurant in Paris until the Franco-Prussian war, when he was hired as a chef for the army. After the war, he married his wife Delphine Daffis, and moved to Monte Carlo four years later. Escoffier met Cesar Ritz in Lucerne. The two became great friends, and went on to work in the kitchen at the Savoy Hotel. There, if you recall from my previous article, he invented the kitchen brigade system, as well as coming up with fantastic new meals. These dishes included a flaming ice, strawberries with pineapple & Curacao sorbet, meringue with vanilla cream and crystallized white rose & violet petals, and jellied chicken breasts with foie gras. He even invented Melba toast, in honor of Australian singer Nellie Melba!

Escoffier once met Kaiser Wilhelm II on the SS Imperator to prepare a lunch and dinner for him. When the Kaiser ate his meal, he was so impressed that he told Escoffier, “I am the emperor of Germany, but you are the emperor of chefs.”

Well, there’s some more information on Georges Auguste Escoffier! Check out my other posts, and feel free to post a comment!