i'm on foodgawker!

My gnocchi with peas, pancetta and pecorino recipe made it onto foodgawker! And yes, I took a screenshot of the web page because I'm nerdy like that. I just joined, so I'm not sure how difficult it is to get a submission accepted, but I'm so excited! There are 137 little hearts at the bottom of the post, so I'm hoping that's a good thing.

gnocchi with peas, pancetta and pecorino

I remember my first time stepping foot in the grocery store across the street from my Rome apartment; from my first sight of the crusty breads, cubed pancetta, heaping piles of parmesan and fresh pasta, I was in love. Since I quickly got sick of eating rigatoni and bucatini with red sauce every night, I started incorporating gnocchi into my meals and on a whim, came up with this dish. A lot of my cooking is guesswork and estimation, so I just sort of eyeball the ratio of peas to pancetta to gnocchi. It's an easy weeknight meal that could be served on a chilly January night or a sweltering Thursday in the summer.

Gnocchi with Peas, Pancetta and Pecorinio

1 package of gnocchi (you could make your own, but who the hell has time for that?)
pancetta or thick cut bacon, cubed
frozen peas
grated pecorino cheese
olive oil
salt + pepper

Bring a pot of salted water to boil. As the water heats, add olive oil to a skillet and cook the cubed pancetta. Remove pancetta from pan with a slotted spoon and reserve about 2 tbsp of the pancetta fat. Once water is boiling, add gnocchi to the pot and watch carefully: it only takes about two minutes for the gnocchi to fully cook. Place frozen peas in collander. Once gnocchi are cooked, pour the gnocchi and boiling water into the collander over the frozen peas (this will thaw them). Shake all of the water from the gnocchi and peas and add the mixture to the same skillet used to cook the pancetta. I let the gnocch sit a bit in the pan so that the outsides get a little brown and crunchy, but you can leave them in as long as you'd like. Once browned to your liking, turn off the stove top and add pancetta to the skillet. Drizzle with olive oil and generously sprinkle pecorino cheese, pepper and a pinch of salt. Toss, plate, and enjoy!

crispy potato hash + fried egg + a piece of mind

It's official. I'm the worst blogger in the entire blogsphere.

Okay, maybe not, but it's 24 degrees in Washington today and the bitter chill is making me dramatic.

The subtext here is that there's no excuse for me to have radio silence for five months and then post about crunchy fried potatoes and fried eggs like everything's okay. I doubt anyone's even reading this blog anyway, as I probably lost any followers within the first month of zero posts. But I digress.

You may think the date of this post has some sort of significance, being the beginning of January and everything, but I'm not one of those New Year's resolutioners. Seriously, I'm not. I don't promise myself that I'll stop swearing or learn a new language or eat more celery sticks just because it's a tradition of a day that really shouldn't even be called a holiday. But again, I digress.

I'm getting back into blogging because I now realize how important it is to do the things that make you happy. When I decided to keep a blog while studying in Rome last year, I first dreaded uploading my pictures and thinking up something witty to accompany it. It always seemed like such a chore and something that only my family and friends back home would appreciate.

But I consider myself a writer, and I'm always looking for new challenges when it comes to my writing. Up until then I would always roll my eyes when my journalism professors rambled on and on about the difference between writing for print and writing online. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I would mumble to myself, checking my cell phone every three minutes in the hopes that class would be over and they'd stop babbling. But blogging has become one of the most creatively challenging things I've ever done, and that includes making homemade bath salts for my unappreciative friends in middle school.

I'll echo what I said in my first post: I'm blogging because I love it and will stop as soon as it becomes an obligation. I'm hoping that this little slice of the Internet can be a journal, an inspiration board, and a saving grace I can escape to when real life just doesn't cut it (or won't cut it out). I hope to gain readers and followers one day, but it's really not all that important; I've just added things that make me happy to my list of priorities.

And no, that was not a New Year's resolution.


Potato Hash + Fried Egg

This is a dish I made quite often while I was studying in Rome last spring (the picture above was actually taken in my tiny Italian kitchen). I was constantly craving homey comfort food - which is kind of awkward considering I ate pasta almost every night - so these homefries quickly became a staple in my breakfast routine. I usually gave myself a lot of time to cook the potatoes, as I don't like to boil them before put them in the pan. Depending on how small the cubes are and how hot the skillet is, I would guess this dish takes about 20 minutes.

1 large egg
7 yellow fingerling potatoes (or baby Yukon golds, whichever you prefer)
fresh butter
salt + pepper

Wash and cube the potatoes, as small or as large as you'd like (I keep mine at about the size of a cheese square). Drop several pats of butter into a hot skillet, followed by the cubed potatoes. You'll need to add more butter as the potatoes cook in order to get that delicious crunchiness around the edges! Top it off with a fried egg (runny's even better) and voila! A fattening breakfast that will put you in a food coma by 10:30 a.m.