I make gnocchi a lot. You can tell I’m making gnocchi because the kitchen gets all floury and the fridge gets filled up with tiny, soft little pillows of flavor.

And because the house gets covered in floury paw prints, courtesy of our lovely (albeit sometimes—make that most of the time—ridiculous) family of cats. I can be a messy cook, and when I make gnocchi, I kind of dust every possible surface with flour, including—more often than not—the floor.

We kind of have a lot of cats at the moment. I won’t say how many exactly, but here’s a couple of photos of the latest additions; Mr. (yes, just Mr.—he’s the only boy) is on the left, and Ossie is on the right. Both were strays that we took in and have been looking after for several weeks. Cute, huh? They’re both pretty shy but got quite excited about the gnocchi business going on in the kitchen and while R. was taking these photos. I couldn’t resist posting these.

But—about the gnocchi: I used sweet potato because I think the color is pretty and I had some lying around. And cumin and thyme? Why? I remembered that in North Africa, sweet potatoes either get baked and eaten with sugar or honey, or they get baked and eaten with salt and cumin, and that got me thinking it could work in gnocchi too. And I thought the thyme played off the cumin nicely and I wanted an alternative to sage, which is the herb traditionally used with gnocchi. So there it is. Enjoy!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 at 9:25 am and is filed under italian, middle eastern, vegetarian. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.