Tuesday Night: Coq au Vin, Gnocchi

After a weekend of travel, I wanted to do a bit of "real" cooking last night, so I made these two recipes from one of the meals in New Home Cooking. I substituted a mixture of dried Italian mushrooms (from TJs) for the dried shitakes in the original chicken recipe and used a kosher chicken.

The gnocchi technique -- tossing them with crunchy breadcrumbs after the initial cooking -- is cool; it's nice to have a bit of crunch. Making the gnocchi themselves was a bit of a pain; the JPT gnocchi method, which pipes them from a pastry bag, seems like a better approach.

As a vegetable we steamed some green and wax beans [CSA] and then tossed them with extra breadcrumbs from the gnocchi.

Despite being a "fancy dinner", this still only took a bit over an hour to prepare; that's certainly under my weeknight pain threshold, particularly considering how good it was.