Butternut Squash Gnocchi

I've been making ricotta gnocchi for several months now with great success, but I had not been brave enough to try my hand at potato gnocchi since Em's and my utter failure at it circa June 2009.

However, a friend had given me a butternut squash and although I love my curried butternut squash soup, I wanted to try something new with this delicious gourd. Enter butternut squash gnocchi.

To begin with I did not want to buy a ricer for the potatoes and presuming that people made potato gnocchi before Williams Sonoma existed, I decided to try it with my 100-year-old, French rotary grater. The results were great! As you can tell, I was very proud of this.

The squash roasted in well under an hour, after which it was pureed and reduced. I then gently mixed, kneaded, rolled and cut the squash-potato dough.

I refrigerated it for a couple hours and then made my big mistake. :( I usually read recipe reviews religiously, but for some reason skipped them for this one. The recipe said to cook the gnocchi for 15-17 minutes, which I thought seemed excessive. It was excessive. They came out well over-done. The sage and brown butter sauce might have been good if the canvass had been better. I served it with sauteed baby eggplant.

This was, however, not a total failure. I learned a lot. First of all, in my ricing reading, I noticed many people recommend ricing potatoes for mashed potatoes. After seeing the light and fluffy results of ricing, I definitely will try this next time I make mashed potatoes. Secondly, I reinforced my emphasis on reading reviews. All the reviews said 15 minutes was too long. Lastly, I could see myself trying potato gnocchi again but probably not this variety. I couldn't really taste the squash at all