Cook A Delicious Meal For The Fiesta!

Our last assignment for ESF was to cook a delicious meal from local, seasonal ingredients and document it. It was awesome to be challenged in this way and I took some time doing research, looking through cookbooks, and going to farmer's markets before I decided what I was going to make.

Let's start from the beginning. I have Italian neighbors. They are awesome people and one day we began to talk about food. I was new to the city and wanted to know their recommendation for the best Italian in the city. I had moved from Reno, Nevada and was excited about all the choices of cuisine in San Francisco. I didn't expect their response of "North Beach is crap, all crap." I had gone to North Beach for my birthday, in fact, and enjoyed it very much. Regardless, they are the Italian ones, so I suppose I trust their opinion. The conversation eventually turned to their favorite Italian dish. Paolo, who is originally from Genoa, Italy, told me his favorite dish was gnocchi with pesto sauce. Gnocchi was something that I'd only recently heard of via one of my vegan cookbooks and I'd been wanting to try out a recipe. "Excellent!" I said. "I shall make you gnocchi with pesto!"
"It wont be as good," Paolo plainly stated.
Slightly offended, I asked him what he meant. Apparently, Genoa is famous for their particular strain of basil, and thus any pesto made from American basil would simply not be as good. After that conversation, I got slightly discouraged regarding gnocchi-making, and eventually forgot about it.
Getting back to the assignment, it occurred to me that gnocchi would be an excellent recipe to make for the class. I went to two farmers markets: the one at USF and the one on Divisadero and Grove.



At the USF market, I bought:
- 1 garlic



- 2 baking potatoes (the last four!)



- 1 artichoke (for one dollar!!)


At the Divisadero market...






I purchased....


- 2 bunches of basil (the last two!)

- 1 bunch of carrots (so sweet!!)

Then I headed home to start the work!


First the potatoes had to be baked for 1 hour in the oven.


Then they had to be placed in ice water so I could peel them while they were still hot! It kinda hurt...


Then I put the potatoes into the food processor with some non-local turmeric. I looked around for local turmeric, but just couldn't find any.
As a side note, I only put the potatoes in the food processor because my masher was broken. I think the food processor was the downfall of my gnocchi. I'll tell you why in a second...


Then I put the mashed potatoes into a mixture of flour and salt. The flour was from Rainbow Grocery and locally milled. The salt I got from my neighbor because my roommate moved out and well...it was her salt. Very funny how you take these things for granted. Anyways, I didn't have any salt, so I decided to do the old-fashioned thing and walk upstairs to ask my neighbor Jamal if he had any salt. I was very lucky because he had this crazy black-colored salt that he got from Rainbow. He said it was stronger than normal salt, so I adjusted to taste. I believe the salt was local because I called Rainbow and they said most of their sea salts were, but I'm not certain.


I mixed it all together and it was incredibly sticky. Because the next step was rolling it out, I had to add a TON of flour in order to prevent it from sticking in huge gooey gobs to my hands and counter (which I cleaned with antibacterial kitchen cleaner before using!). As far as what went wrong, my guess is that the food processing of the potatoes broke up the potato cells too much and released too much water into the mixture. Anyways, rolled out the dough and cut it into pieces. I placed the pieces on a cookie sheet to freeze them. This was the most time consuming part of making this recipe.



While the gnocchi were freezing, I decided to make the pesto. The first step was to roast the pine nuts. I got the pine nuts from Lucky, and I believe they were made in China and distributed out of Southern California. Not very local, but pesto without pine nuts doesn't sound too tasty, especially since the recipe was vegan and would not contain parmesan cheese for extra flavor.


Then I ground the pine nuts, garlic, and salt together in the food processor.


And added basil and olive oil.


I put the pesto in the refrigerator to chill and began to boil water for the gnocchi. I took the frozen gnocchi and dropped them a few at a time into the boiling water and scooped them out to drain when they began to float on the top of the water. I put the cooked gnocchi into a serving dish and tossed it with the chilled pesto. It wasn't as great as I wanted it to be, but people seemed to like it, so I guess that's all that matters!


Trash Produced:
- 1 small plastic bag which contained the pine nuts (so very regrettable...)

I could have made this recipe producing no trash by buying ridiculously expensive pine nuts, but I just didn't have the budget for it at the time.

Anyways, that's my last post for ESF! It's been an amazing year!
Thanks everyone!