Gnocchi, salad with feta

A dressing is prepared of feta and cream along with a salad of lettuce and grapes. 

Gnocchi is prepared with one potato and one egg and fried in butter, then cream poured into the pan to pick up the remaining seasoning and butter for a warm sauce. 

The four simple elements are brought together on the plate for one glorious whole. 

Potato stabbed all the way through multiple times. It almost comes apart, to dry it out as much as possible while cooking in the microwave.

An Egg! Straight from the refrigerator. We do that in the U.S.  It is warming up before touching the potatoes. 

In a flurry of frenetic but precise activity, medium high heat, and dramatic flourishes, the gnocchi are fried in butter quickly and thoroughly rolled on all sides, lifted out and plated, and the pan doused with cream and cleared onto the plate.

Cream of poblano soup

Two things might be useful to know. Cream of something soup usually means a regular soup finished with cream or with sour cream or the like, say, Mexican crema, it does not mean the base of the soup is cream.

For some odd reason, poblano chiles are mislabeled as pisilla by groceries in the United States, the true pisilla (dried raisin) is the dried form of a another smaller thinner red chile. 

 It was almost chicken broth. I could be vegetable broth. 

These are the chiles roasted a few days ago. Time to use them! I couldn't bear to part with them all so held a few back for something else, maybe an omelet, I don't know yet. 

The mixture is taste-tested with three additions in mind. I would like to add masa harina, a corn flour, to thicken the mixture, and I would like to add cheese. If I blend the potato then that starch will make the soup thick, I do not want that, so the potato is removed and  returned after the rest is blended. 

Because the taste is so excellent by itself and thick by itself by blending I forgo the masa harina and cheese. There is cheese on the crostini to compensate. Now with cheese and tomato, the crostini is similar to small crusty pizzas.

I like this soup a lot. The incredible flavor of poblano shines through, and separately these tomatoes are awesome. Naturally you think of tortillas, but I have my own sourdough bread around. A meal can be of this crostini, that it goes so well with this soup is two amazements at once. Considering the things I left out of it, the impulses I resisted, I believe there is a broad range of choices as to how to go about this and all of them win. 

Cherry pie, flaky crust

The filling is like cherry preserves but better than that without being overly sweetened and to compensate for its aggressive cherry tartness, the crust is made as a flaky biscuit. This is like cherry preserves on shortbread biscuit. 

So much emphasis on crust. The following photos come in close on the crust.

So a few hours after I hit publish I received an email sent via Hollywood service provider and I suppose it was intended to be nice but I shot it back with a sharp note, "You just never mind about my pie, Jason Biggs."  How rude.