My friend Mimi suggested a McDonald’s Happy Meal with the toy removed. “Or … or … or,” she sputtered, “how about leftover pizza on a paper plate?”
We were discussing what I should serve a man for what she called “the kiss-off dinner.”
I had been dating Paul for a little while, and though he was terrific, we ultimately had different goals for our relationship. He was also way smarter than me, and that’s never good. I, however, was smart enough to realize the most grown-up way to handle the discussion would be to do so over a nice meal.
Mimi disagreed vehemently. Of course, Mimi does everything vehemently, so I’d expected nothing less. “You don’t want to cook for him,” she argued. “Why waste your time and energy?”
But I saw the awkwardly labeled “kiss-off dinner” as more of an opportunity to stretch my culinary legs than an attempt to exact revenge. I decided to try something I’d never made before because, hey, I never planned to see him again, so who cared if the dish was less than spectacular?
I settled on sweet-potato gnocchi with a sage-brown butter sauce. It all sounded so perfect; sweet potatoes and sage matched up with the barest hint of fall that was in the air. I could easily work it all out ahead of time, giving us plenty of time to have the dreaded talk.
The recipe seemed straightforward enough: bake the potatoes, mix them with some eggs into a dough, roll, and cut. The first inkling that I was in for trouble came at the direction to scrape the tines of a fork down the baked sweet potatoes so I could amass fluffy little piles of potatoes. My potato piles never even came close to anything resembling fluffiness; it should have been a warning to me. Likewise, I probably also should have heeded the recipe’s dire admonition to not overmix the dough, lest my gnocchi emerge as leaden pillows of despair. But I ignored that one, too.
I am, however, nothing if not perseverant, so I blundered along in my quest to make a memorable meal. After kneading the dough, rolling it out, cutting it and marking it with the tines of a fork, the standard gnocchi-making protocol next involved dropping them into a pot of boiling water and then finally giving the little guys a quick sauté in browned butter. It didn’t seem too hard to me; I mean, I can follow directions as well as the next guy.
As you might imagine, somewhere along the path to gnocchi nirvana, I screwed up. I don’t know if I mixed in too much flour, if the eggs were too small, or if I made the gnocchi too fat. I do know that instead of the relatively sophisticated and sultry image I was hoping to present on this, my last night with Paul, I was, in fact, a flour- and sweet potato-covered pile of insecurity when he rang the doorbell. I’d aimed for Nigella Lawson and ended up Lucille Ball.
Once I got to the gnocchi-boiling stage of operations, I figured I was home free. I will freely admit to any number of culinary deficiencies, but boiling water for pasta is not one of them. The recipe’s quaint directions said the gnocchi would “tell me when they are done.” For a minute, I thought maybe this meant I’d have some sort of Old Testament experience, a burning bush would appear on the cooktop, but now I think it probably meant that when the gnocchi were done, they would rise to the surface of the boiling water. And of course, this did happen, but I was too involved with something else to notice. So they boiled merrily along for probably a good 10 minutes, at which point, they’d probably been crying out for deliverance.
Unfortunately, the overboiling was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Instead of light pillows of warm, slightly chewy, spiced dough, I ended up with little squares that managed to be simultaneously phlegmatic and slimy. The butter sauce was good, but it’s hard to screw up melted butter. And we had yet to have that talk.
Honestly, I don’t know whether he felt sorry for me or just was a fool for mucilaginous globs of orange dough, but he mercifully postponed our discussion, thus saving my already gnocchi-battered ego. At the subsequent kiss-off dinner a few weeks down the road, I made an old standby, beautiful lamb shanks braised in a hearty red-wine bath. It’s one of my most beloved dishes, and as delightful as it was, it wasn’t enough to save the relationship. Next time, I might go the Happy Meal route after all.
Shannon Parker, freelance writer and regular Sauce contributor, lives with her three children (two human, one canine) in St. Louis.
This article appears in May 1-31, 2009.