Cooking Floyd: Making Coatings Stick

This is one of those things where you wonder why you hadn't figured it out years ago.  Here I was trying to use plain old egg wash to make stuff stick to other food stuffs when I should have been using whipped egg whites!  No more delicious coatings falling off into the pan!

Whip an egg white to a soft peak.  Pat dry and season whatever it is you're coating (in this case a salmon fillet).  Dip in the egg white and then press into the coating mixture (in this case sesame seeds but finely chopped nuts worked great too).  Place encrusted side down in a medium hot oiled pan until browned.  Then flip and finish on the stove top or in a hot oven.

Cooking Floyd: Sweet Potato Gnocchi

Nyuk-nyuk-nyuk! That's how I remember the pronunciation.  The 3 Stooges' Curly's way of laughing.  nya-OH-key.  Gnocchi!  Gnocchi are an Italian dumpling traditionally made with cooked starchy potatoes, flour and sometimes an egg, then boiled and sauced.  The beauty of gnocchi is that they are a blank canvas.   You can add all kinds of things to the basic recipe from spinach to cheese, herbs, spices and more.  I have two half bushel boxes of sweet potatoes squirreled away so I chose to make mine from our Beauregard variety.

By the way, if you're planning on growing sweet potatoes next season, the time to start your slips is NOW!  Slips are expensive and sometimes hard to find.  I started mine last year from grocery store sweets with great success.  Click here for directions.

Back to Gnocchi.

Cooking Floyd: Caldo Verde - Portuguese Potato-Kale-Sausage Soup

1-18-13  Ok, not the most auspicious start to the New Year.  That flu turned into bronchitis.  Still doing antibiotics, still coughing, but definitely doing better.  And the computer went down.  After Michael did a diagnostic and then another 2 hour diagnostic with some tech guy in India, HP had us send the tower to them somewhere in Indiana.  Thank God it was still under warranty because the mother board was fried.  So we're back online and-  oops....

1-19-13  Power's back on and we're back online *again*.