Dinners of the week

Patrick made us a delicious Tilapia with orange bell peppers, red onions, and olives, which we ate with wild rice and brussel sprouts. He is an effortless chef!

Later in the week, we had Sophie and Jim over for dinner. Patrick and I have been trying to follow Julia Child's advice of having courage in the kitchen, so with that in mind, we decided to try our hands at making gnocchi. I had recently had pumpkin gnocchi with truffle sauce at a restaurant in Belgium, so we set out to re-create our version of that dish.

We used Anne Burrell's recipe for gnocchi, and

made half as suggested and half with pumpkin.

We used a food mill for the first time, which was

fun, but also kind of tiring!

The dough for the pumpkin gnocchi was more
dense and tacky than the pure potato gnocchi,
but had a nice flavor.

We made a crème fraîche-based sauce, threw in some parsley at the last minute, and topped it with walnuts and a drizzle of truffle oil.

And for dessert, we cooked some prunes in cognac and vanilla and served them with vanilla ice cream swirled with a chocolate cognac sauce. The warm prunes were soft and juicy and tasted great with the cold ice cream.

For love of butter

It's true: butter makes everything better. I've recently become infatuated with the tasty simplicity of sautéing bananas in butter with a little bit of sea salt. The bananas take on a delicious nuttiness, and they break down around the edges and and combine with the butter into a gooey, sweet sauce that is punctuated with juicy bits of banana. Patrick and I had this for breakfast over oatmeal spiced with a bit of cinnamon and cardamom, topped with toasted walnuts.