Theme Recipe: Houses Own Baked Potato Gnocchi

In Season 6, Dr. House discovers his passion for cooking.  It's a way for him to get seriously obsessive about something, and try to forget about his pain.  When House cooks, he goes in for high end Haute Italian fare.  One person has already tried House's seriously kicked up Bolognese Sauce with the star anise, and says that it is good.  Remember also that House's sauce also includes a serious amount of caramelized onion as well.  I've experimented with his Gnocchi.  He bakes the potatoes, rather than boil them, like every other recipe out there instructs.  Honestly, it took a television character of a seriously dysfunctional addict doctor to think of baking??  I've experimented, and, voila, it does make the gnocchi lighter!!

DR. HOUSE'S BAKED POTATO GNOCCHI 

1 1/2 lbs. starchy baking potatoes

1 cup (that's 1/4 lb.) bread flour, plus extra for rolling

Salt to taste

Bake the potatoes at 400 degrees for 45 to 50 minutes; you want them soft but not mushy. As soon as you can, peel them, they must still be warm.  Mash them with a fork.  Sift in the flour and salt (I use around 1/2 tsp. salt) and mix into a pliable sticky dough.  

Roll into a medium sized log shape and cut into 1 inch pieces--use extra flour on the board while rolling as needed.  With a buttered fork, press each piece to flatten and serrate the dumpling.  

Boil in lightly salted boiling water and remove as soon as they come to surface.  Drain and sauce.

VARIATIONS

You can purchase a gnocchi rolling board that has ridges, so when you flatten the dumpling, you can roll the dumpling on the board and it will curl into a tube with ridges.  See above.

Or you can flatten with you thumb, or with any object that will leave a imprint.

You flavor the dumpling with spinach puree, herbs, tomato paste, saffron, etc.  Anything you like or can dream up!  For Halloween season, adding some pumpkin is a great addition.

You can make them out of different types of potato or sweet potato.  The native Caribbean Boniato, or white sweet potato make an excellent baked spud dumpling because of their high starch content.  Regular sweet potato works too (see above with the fork).  They are very striking made from blue potatoes!

For truly Native American gnocchi, add corn flour to the mix, and cut down on the flour to 1/2 cup.  Blue or red cornmeal are great choices.  These are actually made this way out in the New Mexican Pueblos.

SAUCE SUGGESTIONS:

I admit that when making gnocchi at home from scratch I tend to want the sauce to be easy, and by easy I mean heat and serve....like out of a jar.  But there are some really good sauces out there these days!  A really high end Vodka Sauce is a household favorite--they even carry it at Walmart.

Try making House's Bolognese sauce.  I'd make that the day before, it's seriously invovled.

Cream sauces are fast and easy, just dust with some grated Parm.  Traditionally in Italy, a Gorgonzola cheese sauce is used.

Another really traditional Italian way to serve homemade gnocchi is with sauteed chicken livers.