Gruyere Stuffed Purple Potato Dumplings with a Walnut Parsley Pesto

Recently I was invited to submit an original recipe to the Idaho Potato Commission as part of their "February is Potato Lovers Month" campaign.  I happily accepted; after all, this challenge involved two things that are close to my heart: potatoes and money. Not only would I (full disclosure) be paid for my time and trouble in creating the recipe, my dish would be featured (along with those of other participants) on the Idaho Potato homepage for the whole month of February. As an added bonus, prize money was up for grabs, as the commission would choose several winners, including best dish, most original recipe, and best photo.

Well guess what kids? I am very proud to announce that the image at the top of this post won in the "Best Photo" category! Many thanks to the Idaho Potato Commission for this award.

Gnocchi a la Parisienne for French Fridays with Dorie

Blogger Sanjana of KO Rasoi (if you don't read her blog you should!) recently jokingly referred to me as the supreme master of gnocchi. While I certainly wouldn't go so far as to call myself anything close to a master, I certainly do seem to have turned into quite the gnocchi maker of late. This is, after all, the fourth time I've done a gnocchi post. And I have a feeling it won't be the last.

First, I made sweet potato gnocchi with brown butter sage sauce; then came malfatti, lovely quenelles of Swiss chard, after a dish I loved at Al di La Trattoria in Brooklyn;  followed most recently by oh-so-light Viennese gnocchi baked in pumpkin cream. And now here we have these little dough balls again for French Fridays with Dorie, the weekly blogger event where members cook a predetermined dish from Dorie Greenspan's book Around My French Table. Yep, me and gnocchi ... we're tight like that.

Liptauer: The Cheese of Champions ... and We Have a Winner!

While I don't believe that liptauer cheese is widely recognized as a cheese of champions, I thought it was a fitting moniker here, as I have chosen this recipe to accompany the announcement of my pumpkin seed oil giveaway winner, which I'll announce at the end of this post. (Even if you don't read the whole thing, I have to at least compel you to scroll through the entire post to find out the winner,  now don't I?)

This also happens to be a  dish that I served at Poppa Trix's birthday dinner  alongside the gnocchi baked in pumpkin cream.  The dinner, as you may recall,  was intended as a recreation of our heuriger meals in Vienna. Truth be told, Poppa and I had never even heard of liptauer until we tasted it, not at the upscale Weinhof Wieninger, but at the rather more homey Kierlinger heuriger, where it was reputed to be something of a specialty.