Feeling nostalgic: Marianne's butternut squash gnocchi

One of the songs that always makes me melt, regardless of who sings it , is The Beatles "In My Life." Look up the lyrics if you don't know it, and see if it doesn't do that to you. I'm sure that there is at least one person it reminds you of. Send off the lyrics immediately. And I bet you wish that someone would send them to YOU as well. (Someone DID send them to me recently. Melted me like gentle heat melts butter).

Marianne Esposito is a cook and cookbook author who has that kind of place in my life. I discovered her by accident one day, when Guy was off at a music retreat, and I was flipping through the TV, looking for something "good to watch." This smiling, heavy set Italian woman was chirping away through recipes, and I JUST LOVED HER STYLE. Interestingly enough, when Guy first saw her on TV, his reaction was "Oh, she's you with a skirt." Marianne and I have met, a couple of times, and we've cooked together. In fact, one day I may write about how she called me up in front of a group of students at a class at Macy's because I was "one of the two handsomest men in the audience." And guess what? Her husband's name is Guy. And like mine, one of his hobbies is photography. So maybe we are the same person.

Anyway, the recipe Marianne was making on the show that day was butternut squash gnocchi. At the end, she ate a few of them, raised her eyebrows and said "these are GOOD." Yes, they are. I don't make them often enough , but I'm getting a hankering to make them. We have some entertaining to do in the future, and this may very well be on the menu.

I have changed Marianne's recipe a little, by leaving out an ingredient(I will explain), and changing the sauce. I have also changed the timing on making it. I turn it into a two day recipe, but that's only because I'm impatient. You need cooked, pureed butternut squash for this, and it takes a while to cool. So I make the squash on one day, and make the gnocchi the second day.

Don't use canned pumpkin here. The texture is just not right. It's too wet, and you wind up adding too much flour. Do it from scratch.

Start by cutting a medium sized butternut squash in half, and scoop out all of the gunkies. Then put it, cut sides down, on a baking sheet. Pour half a cup of water to the baking sheet, and put the whole thing in the oven, and bake it for at least a half hour, at 350. It's hard to determine how long to bake these things, but the way I tell is this: put on an oven mitt, and press down at the middle of the long part of the squash (this is the part that takes the longest to cook). If it's soft enough to yield , it's ready. Let it cool down, and scoop out the squash. You want to drain this a bit, by putting it in a sieve, over something liquid can drain into. You'll get a surprising amount of it. I find it takes a couple of hours to drain completely, and again, you can let this happen in the fridge. Then, take the squash, and mash it with a spoon, a meat pounder, a potato masher, whatever you have. You CAN use a food processor, but you'll release more liquid. After you've done this to the squash, scoop out about a cup and a half of it. If you have left over, use it in soup or muffins or something like that. Take that cup and a half of squash, and add half a cup of grated parmesan, a large egg, and a few scrapings of nutmeg (At this point, Marianne adds some crushed amaretti cookies, a third of a cup. By all means, use them if you like. I think the resulting gnocchi are just a bit too sweet for me). Also add half a teaspoon of salt. Stir everything together.

Now this is the part I like doing the best. You need two cups of all purpose flour. Keep an additional half a cup in reserve. Form it into the shape of a volcano, with a hollow in the center. Put your squash in the hollow.

When you make gnocchi, or pasta, or anything using this technique, what you do is you start stirring the flour into the soft ingredient, almost tablespoon by tablespoon, stirring with a fork. Eventually, you'll get a soft, but solid dough, and then you can get your hands into it and combine everything. Try to be gentle, because if you handle them too heavily, you'll get tough gnocchi.

Did you add enough flour? this is a good question and there is only one way to tell. Get a small pot of water boiling and pinch off a piece about the size of a walnut. Lower the heat to a simmer, and then drop in the dough. If it holds together, you've added enough. If not, add some of that reserved flour (recipes like this are very sensitive to the ambient temperature, humidity and whatnot, so that's why you can't be precise).

Traditionally, what you do at this point is divide the dough into four pieces and roll it into ropes. You can do that if you feel very traditional. But you could also break off pieces about the size of a small walnut, and roll them in your hands. As you do this, put them on paper lined baking sheets. You should get a LOT of them. I don't get the 160 Marianne says the recipe makes, but I do get a hundred or so. If you like the traditional "shape" of a gnocchi, press the back of the tines of a fork into each one. Some feel this helps pick up the sauce. I don't find it necessary, but this is your call.

These guys do not refrigerate well. They FREEZE well, but leaving them in the refrigerator will get them soggy and wet and BLECH. If you aren't going to use them right away, what I would suggest is that you leave them unrefrigerated, with a cloth thrown over them to keep your cat's hair from getting in them.

When you're ready to cook these, it's important to cook them gently. In my experience, the biggest problem people have with gnocchi is they boil them like pasta. Nope. You want a simmer, and unless you have a REALLY big pot, don't do more than a quarter at a time. Use well salted water, and drop in the gnocchi. Stir them gently, because they tend to fall to the bottom of the pot and stick. Eventually, they will begin to come to the top of the pot, which means they're ready. Scoop them out with a slotted spoon or a salamander spoon, something like that.

Now, these take SO well to an herb butter sauce, that I can' t think of eating them any other way. I have had them with rosemary sauce, and sage sauce. I like sage better, but both will work. To make it, - ready for this - it's REAL complicated - melt a stick of butter or two sticks. Add about ten sage leaves, or three or four sprigs of rosemary and let this sit for ten minutes.

Think you could handle that sauce? As the gnocchi come out of the pot, drop them into the sauce. Stir it gently, and then add a bit more parmesan to the top.

IF you didn't use the cookies, and you are having your doubts, now you can crumble some and put the crumbs over the pasta. But I suggest you don't do that.

"In my life, I've loved them all." You know you feel it. So make these. Or ask someone to make them for you. But hell, whether you do one or both of those, get those lyrics and send them to someone with a note saying "I've been thinking of you."