Trying Something New In The Kitchen

Good Morning and Happy Thursday/Almost the weekend.

And a Good morning sunshine from Gusman and our Thursday morning walk.

I forgot to start my MapMyRun application when we started, so it’s showing a little shorter than normal. . . but today’s walk was our standard hilly loop.  Just enough to get my legs refreshed after a TOUGH workout last night.

Workout Last Night

I had a tough day at work yesterday and needed to blow off some steam when I got home.  What better way to do that then get a quick sweat on?

I had remembered seeing a really good Boot Camp style routine Julie’s PBFingers.com that sounded like the perfect sweat fest to do the trick.

To do this routine, you did three minutes at each square, with 30 seconds rest in between.  The only thing I switched up was square 9 (60 seconds of: shuffles bear crawl and backwards run) to a second RUN section because our small apartment gym doesn’t quite provide the space for those work outs.

When I finished this routine, I was shaking and had completely forgotten about my work frustration for the time being.  Perfect-o.  Thanks, Julie 🙂

Dinner

It’s a good thing I got a good sweat in, too, because Zach and I had fun Pinterest inspired dinner plans for ourselves last night.

http://www.playfulcooking.com/pasta/arugula-gnocchi-spicy-brown-butter-sauce/

We’ve been wanting to switch things up a bit in the kitchen so we decided to go big last night and try our hand at gnocchi.  Arugula gnocchi to be exact.

While it was definitely challenging, and we will do a few things differently next time (mash the potato more, less flour), overall the end result was delicious and I think we’ve got new confidence in ourselves and our cooking!

It took about 45 minutes for our large potato to boil, then we removed the skin and began mashing.  Unfortunately Zach and I do not have a masher OR gnocchi maker, so we had to make do.  I left the mashing to the strong man, and started work on the arugula addition.

One large handful of arugula and one egg yolk blended together in the food processor.

We added the “dressing” and potatoes together then slowly started integrating one cup of all purpose flour. We actually didn’t end up using all of our flour (maybe next time 2 potatoes), but the dough came together surprisingly easily.

We rolled the dough out into one large log, and then cut it into 5 smaller pieces.

Each piece then got rolled into a smaller log and cut into the small gnocchi pieces.  I then handed Zach the little pieces and he forked them to put the final “gnocchi” tough.

After they were done, all we had to do was bring a pot of water to a boil and boil the gnocchi until they began floating (we did ours in two batches).

Once they were all floating, we added them to an already prepared pan of 2 tablespoons of butter, one tablespoon of oil, garlic and chili pepper for a final crisping of the pasta.

We served ours with parmesan and side salads

For a nice, complete and overall pretty delicious meal.

Like I mentioned, this was our first attempt and we didn’t do things perfectly.  We also didn’t have all the ingredients the actual recipe called for so we had to make a few changes, but overall I’m proud of our first attempt.  Please click that first picture (the pretty one) for the actual pin and recipe!

For those of you that are scared to try something like this in the kitchen, don’t be!  We opened up a bottle of wine and just had fun with it!

Time to get to work 🙂

Question of the Morning: When was the last time you tried something new in the kitchen?  What’s your favorite thing to prepare?

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