Potato Gnocchi

Tonight we had a ‘ol stir-fry for dinner with broccoli, peppers, onion and mushrooms.  Boring, right?  That’s what I thought too, until I saw these little white dumpling looking things in it as well.  Terry called them ‘gnocchi’.  That’s pronounced ‘nyo-kee‘ (with a silent ‘g’) not ‘goo-nochy‘.  Huh.

As it turns out, gnocchi are Italian in origin and is actually a type of pasta – the non-noodle kind – that dates back as far as the early Romans (those guys who wore the bed sheets and loved feeding things to lions).  Gnocchi are made from ordinary wheat flour,egg, cheese, and potato.  So, really, little dumplings wasn’t really far off and that’s kinda what they tasted like too; like eating little fluffy clouds.  Yummy.  These Romans were really onto something.  In fact, I liked them more than the actual stir-fry.  I wonder if next time Terry can just make me a plate of gnocchi without, you know, all that other stuff (except mushrooms – I love me some mushrooms).

Scallops

Tonight I tried something a little, hmm, let’s say…’adventurous’.  Terry made some homemade pasta and sauce and with it he served these weird looking things he called ‘scallops’.  He says they are the ‘delicious pearls of the sea’.  I call hogwash.

Anyway, I was skeptical since I’m not really a lover of sea food so we Googled ’em and I learned that scallops are basically just a name applied to the meat from any ‘ol run of the mill marine mollusk or shell fish.  What we were in fact eating was the white roundish muscle called the ‘adductor’ that’s located inside the shell that helps them open and close the shell so they can swim.  When I asked Terry if people had adductor muscles too he said ‘yes’ and pointed to the inside of his leg.  Great.  I’m eating mollusk crotch.  Gross.

Needless to say these are not ‘delicious pearls of the sea‘…’pearls from Hell‘ maybe, or ‘chunky gross thing of the sea‘ perhaps, but definitely not delicious.  The pasta was pretty good though – I’ll give him that much (but, seriously, you can’t really screw up boiling noodles can you?).    But I’m not likely to try anything from the sea for a while.

Corned Beef Hash

This past weekend mommy and Terry took me to Rochester, NY to visit the ‘National Museum of Play‘ which was pretty awesome.  While there we  stayed with some friends of Terry’s, Lance and Amy (who are also pretty awesome I might add) and their three pugs Althea, Tinkerbell and Spike who I got to babysit while we visited.  And the awesome just keeps piling on.  Oh, and there was lots of food and treats, of course.  Apparently these friends of Terry’s eat almost as much as he does.

On Sunday morning we had a HUGE breakfast including steak (leftover from last nights dinner) and eggs with lots of sausage, bacon, toast, juice (not to mention that black stuff that mommy and Terry seem to put away by the gallon) and a big heaping bowl of “corned beef hash”.  Seriously, who eats this much?  I was still full from Saturday nights BBQ.  But anyway, while I vacuumed up everything else, I will admit that I was a bit skeptical about the hash since it looked, well, it looked kind of weird…like something the pugs might eat.  I mean, what is ‘corned beef’ anyway?  And ‘hash’?  Sure doesn’t sound too appealing.

However, as per usual, I was encouraged to try a little bit (and I do mean just a ‘little bit’) on mommy’s fork and, yup, just as I figured…gross.  Like really gross. I figured that maybe Lance had accidentally put the dogs breakfast on the table.  Who knows?  These things happen. But then I put a dollop of ketchup on it and, hey, it’s not so bad.  If there’s anything that ketchup doesn’t improve then I sure don’t know about it!  I can now say, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I don’t like ‘corned’, like, anything.  It’s probably only going to end up being nasty (particularly the beef).  So I can now add this it to my ever-growing ‘Big List of Yuck’…unless it has ketchup that is.