Tentacle Gnocchi

 OH!  I didn't see you come in, Dungeon Meshi Maniacs.  I've been so focused on this week's dish that my mind has been all over the place.  You see...I've been dreading this week since the start of the project.  Sure, we've eaten so many wonderous things and even with my lack of cooking skills I've managed to make fairly decent dishes.  This week, however, I knew was going to be a struggle.  What is the dish of dread, you may ask?  Technically it is Tentacle Gnocchi.

"What a stupendous let down, you overselling slime." I can hear you tap feverishly into your telegraph.  Now, now, DMMs.  You've never known me to be the overly dramatic type.  Check the second ingredient on the list above.  What do you see there? Could it be a creature of the amphibian variety? Giant Frog!

The Tentacle Gnocchi may be the recipe name but it's the giant frog that is the main event!  Amphibians aren't something that I'm used to eating or cooking.  But there's more to my dread than unfamiliarity, DMMs.  Way back in the before time I lived in Coal Country USA™.  Our town had the one major restaurant.  Sure, we had the typical fast food joints but for the longest time there was only one sit down place.  The quality was...fairly edible.  I wasn't a fan.  When your choice is Micky D's or a kinda bad restaurant where would you beg your parents to go?  Normally it was a steak and eggs type of place but for some reason one year the place put frog legs on the menu, boys!  My dad thought it would be fun to try.  So we had take out frog's legs that night.  Frankly they didn't look great but I'm not one to turn down dinner.  I never gagged harder in my life.  I LOVE to eat, DMMs.  I couldn't eat this.  Who knows what caused the problem.  Could have been the frogs.  Could have been preparation.  Could have been I was just a kid.  Whatever it was it made me sick and I've avoided frog legs ever since.  Unrelated, this was also the restaurant where I saw a kid get a brutal electrical shock when trying to plug in an old arcade machine.  He was fine...eventually.

I will say that I really love frogs as a creature!  Both the regular and giant size, I'm a fan.  I think that has to do with listening to them sing when the sunset backhome.  Fantastic for keeping bugs away when they are small.  A giant frog, however?  I can see why that's a creature to be avoided.

Chilchuck, NO!  You have so many kids to continue ignoring!  Lucky for Chilchuck the frog has a major weakness. Arrows to the brainpan.

As you know by now, DMMs, a dead monster equals a devoured monster in this dungeon.  But a party can't exist on pounds of frog meat alone.  So Senshi sets to making a potassium dence "main" dish. Gnocchi!

 I have to admit, DMMs, I wasn't expecting this.  Who makes gnocchi by hand?  It honestly never occured to me to try.  But if a super chef dwarf can do it in a monster filled dungeon surely I can do it in my air conditioned kitchen with working oven!  Before we begin I have made a slight substitution. Keen-eyed Dungeon Meshi Maniacs will know that I use plantains for tentacles.  This time I'm going with the potato.  I'm pretty sure you could make gnocchi with plantains but this week I need something more straight forward.  So we have the potato. What else do we need?

 Pretty basic, DMMS.  Potatoes, egg, flour, and salt.  That's it!  Looking into recipes for gnocchi I've found discussion of boiling your potato vs. baking.  You want fluffy gnocchi and both sides have merit but I decided to go with baking for the first step.  The key to fluffiness is less water, right?  Which baking seems to have an edge on.  Set that oven to 400 degree and stab the potatoes all over!

Grrr!  Take that you dirt covered tubers!  Once you're done with your potato assault tuck them into the oven for an hour and twenty minutes.  You just need them to roast, nothing fancy.  Once time has passed you'll want to let them cool to the touch and take the skin off.  According to the big wigs online you'll now push the potatoes through something called a "potato ricer"?  What the hell?  I don't have potato ricer money!  Luckily you can mash them.  It's not a perfect alternative but it will work.

 Stabbing, roasting and smashing! I'm going to prison, I'll be doing time. I'm going to get arrested for potato crimes!  Not today, thankfully.  Nope, now it's time to make a shaggy dough.  Put the egg, a cup of flour and salt into the potatoes and knead.

FUN!  I love to knead dough.  You don't want to overwork it.  Just get it together.  Once it comes together you'll form disc and divided it into fourths.

Looking a little weird, DMMS.  But functional.  That's the Nih family motto, by the way.  Once you have your divisions you'll just want to roll them out like Play-Doh, about half an inch in thickness.  And then cut into bit sized pieces.

Two things, DMMS.  One, it was at this point that I remembered that I forgot to put in the salt. Oops.  Don't do that. Remember to put in the salt.  Second, I struggled to put in the "gnocchi grooves" into the pieces.  Apparently there is something called a Gnocchi Board that you roll the pieces over.  Since I'm not a professional gnocchi artist I have no need to a Gnocchi Board.  I added grooves the way the common man does.  With the back of a fork!  Now it's time to put the finishing touches on this dish.  We are going to fry our gnocchi!  Put about three tablespoons of butter into a pan over medium heat.  Add the gnocchi and fry them up for about 13ish minutes, stirring occasionally.

Why yes, I do my my pan around a lot when cooking.  Good eye, DMM!  Now in this write up the gnocchi is done but in the real world the frogs were cooking on the hot burner to the right.  To start that dish we have to travel several hours into the past.  Frog legs need a lot of preparation for some reason!  First, let's take a look at the frog legs that we are going to consume.

I have to admit, DMMs...this makes me a little uneasy.  The muscles look too much like human leg muscles.  As a runner, I've seen them in diagrams many times so I keep seeing tiny human legs.  And we all know the only reason we don't eat human is that we taste terrible.  That doesn't mean frog legs are going to be nasty...right?  We're going to find out! First thing's first.  We need to let these bad boys soak in some buttermilk for at least an hour.  Why?  I honestly can't get a good explanation.  Apparently this gets out any impurities that have gotten into the muscles.  Everyone says this is what you do and who am I, a humble slime, to question everybody?  Into a bowl of buttermilk and into the fridge they go!

 After an hour you pat them dry and put them into a second bowl.  Bowl number two is where you add your seasonings.  I kept it simple, DMMs.  Salt, pepper, powdered onion, powdered garlic, hot sauce, and tonkatsu sauce.  What?  Tonkatsu sauce is awesome.  Worcestershire sauce is the typical ingredient but why have hamburger when you could have steak?

These go in for thirty minutes.  Once that time has passed you have to get ready for some frying!  Not like with the gnocchi, no.  This is DEEP frying!  And deep frying means assembly line cooking!

What we have here is frog legs on the far right. Take a leg and go down the line.  Flour, egg wash, flour with benefits, 375 degree peanut oil.  The flour is pretty easy.  The flour with benefits is flour mixed with cornmeal & salt/pepper.  But what's in the egg wash?  Egg along with pretty much everything you've marinated the frog legs in but with dijon mustard and beer!

I'm not a drinker, DMMS.  Not because I'm a teetotaler, mind you.  My palate just isn't sophisticated enough to notice a difference in alcohol.  All alcoholic beverages taste like alcohol to me! And it's not a flavor I really enjoy so I tend to not drink.  This causes issues when I need to cook with things like beer.  Did you know it came in different colors?  I assume that's what makes a dark beer dark?  Anyway, you need a dark beer for this and amber is dark...right?  No clue.  This seemed to work though.  Once the frogs go down the line it's into the frier!

Bubble bubble!  Three minutes on each side and you'll get a golden brown!

Now the moment of truth, DMMS.  The gnocchi wasn't bad.  I served it with some pesto that I had on hand and it was fairly passable.  I could tell it was missing the salt, though.  Tasted kinda of flat.  But I was happy with it.  The frog legs were interesting.  It had been 30 years since that bad time I had with the frog legs. That wasn't long enough for me to get over it, apparently.  The first bite nearly gagged me again!  But it was just an automatic response so I powered through it.  The frog legs I made were actually pretty good!  Once I got past that initial bite I really enjoyed these.  Frog tastes more like fish than anything I can think of.  I mean, ultimately they taste like frog but if you've never had them that's the closest flavor in my mind.  And the meat is bright white.  Almost like cod!  I'm glad that I faced my worries and made the frog legs myself.

So that's it for this week, DMM...what?  You want me to talk about the other thing made with the giant frogs?  Look, I am barely a cook.  What makes you think I can sew?  Even Laios does a better job that I ever could.

With that out of the way we are getting close to the most famous dish in all of Dungeon Meshi, DMMs.  One that Laios and Senshi have looked forward to since the start.  But before that we'll talk about foods and what how people view them.  Heavy stuff! See you then!