From Italy to Hong Kong: Cooking mum’s gnocchi recipe miles away

It started with potato gnocchi. My mum had managed to find some farina 00 (extra fine, soft flour used in a lot of pasta-making) at the supermarket. “A miracle! They’ve been out of flour for days!” she shouted when she told me – and, while queuing six feet apart from the person ahead of her to pay, she had a sudden craving for the doughy dumplings. She had spuds (potatoes) at home. Gnocchi would make an excellent lunch.

Back home, she video called me on FaceTime, which is how we have been increasingly communicating since she has been under lockdown in Rome, Italy, as the coronavirus pandemic has brought the world to a halt.

“I’m going to make gnocchi,” she announced. “Want to make them with me? I’ll teach you.”

I was just thinking about dinner while sitting in my Hong Kong apartment, not under lockdown, but self-isolating with my boyfriend as a precautionary measure. The city has maintained a relatively low number of COVID-19 cases, and has so far only implemented social distancing guidelines, including working from home.

I had not had gnocchi in forever and had never attempted making them myself.

“Why not,” I thought. I went out, got my ingredients (minus the farina 00, which is hard to find here). I settled for buckwheat flour, then called her back.

Almost 6,000 miles apart, phones propped on one side of our respective work surfaces – hers a spacious countertop, mine the dining table (given my kitchen’s ridiculously small size) – we started cooking together.

We have been doing so for the past few weeks. In her early mornings and my afternoons, we pick up our phones and decide the dish of the day – or rather she will tell me what she wants us to make – mostly looking at what is in our cupboards.

If needed, we will head out to get any missing item, although we are both trying to minimise our trips outside. When we encounter empty shelves, we adjust our respective grocery lists: packaged Edam slices instead of parmesan for me; a different baking powder brand from the one she has been using for decades for her, which annoyed her infinitely.

“It’s absolutely ridiculous,” she huffed on FaceTime about me using sunflower seeds in place of pine nuts for pesto. 

But she reassures me the substitutions are fine: this is not the time to worry about perfection, and Italian cooking is all about adapting and getting inventive with what is available, she says (although how she wishes she could use her trusted baking powder) so, “We’ll just have to make it work.” 

We have.

Besides the gnocchi – for which, it turns out, buckwheat flour does not really work, though the final dumplings mixed with homemade fresh pesto and shrimps tasted delicious all the same – there have been piadine and zuppa di ceci (chickpea soup), a hefty lasagna and risotto verde (green risotto made with carrots and courgettes).

We have been baking, too: brittle hazelnut cookies known as brutti ma buoni (literally ‘ugly but good’); almond biscotti; a super zesty lemon cake, which came out golden brown for her and darker for me, as I replaced white sugar and all-purpose flour with brown coconut sugar and spelt. 

It is the type of food I have grown up with and my mum likes most: carb-heavy, soul-soothing, comforting to both the heart and belly. Right now, it is all I feel like eating. 

It is also a thread that is connecting us beyond the fears and distance of our everyday. Our very own binding agent. 

Until our cooking sessions, my mum never really tried to get me into the kitchen. As most Italian mothers do, she still treats me as if I am 15 years old whenever I am home, not expecting any help, let alone input when it comes to meal planning. 

On my end, I too never sought to cook together. For much of my adult life – since leaving Italy at the age of 18 for university – I have had no interest in the gastronomic feats of my native country, focusing instead on mastering Asian cuisines (I live for dal and swear by bowls of noodles). I took Italian food entirely for granted, not caring to learn its basics and tricks, its often forgiving give-or-take proportions, the liveliness of its flavours.

Now, under my mum’s directions, I chop, slice, stir and fry, unearthing familiar scents and learning things about her cooking, and her. 

Some main takeaways: always use red potatoes for gnocchi, as they will make a better dough. Only use a wooden spoon to mix your risotto: it rubs off more surface starch than a metal one. Soffritto – a mixture of slowly cooked carrots, onions and celery, the “holy trinity” of Italian cuisine  – will add depth to pretty much anything. Chickpeas are best dried, not tinned, and soaked in water overnight. 

Also: she learned to cook when she left home, at 21, as my grandmother was just as protective of her role of head nourisher, and would not let her make anything. She hates parsley, loves basil and is impartial to rosemary and thyme. She finds baking cathartic, and if she has had a tough day – or, in lockdown, a particularly anxious one – she will whip away her bad moods by thinking up a new cake recipe. 

Lastly: her dishes always end up looking much better than mine. 

But that is beside the point. Cooking apart together, we have been rediscovering each other. Where once we would just text, calling only every other week, we now dial in multiple times a day, and have hour-long conversations that sometimes are not related to food at all.

My mum plans our menus, consults her cookbooks and asks my stepdad to take photos, relieved to have something else to do besides watching the news. She shares stories and memories related to different dishes, tips she learned both in and outside the kitchen, and, for a while, forgets about boredom and constant worries.  

“Shall we try bread this weekend?” she asked me the other day, a twinge of genuine excitement in her voice.

Yes, as long as she would show me how to make ravioli with spinach and ricotta, for which I recently developed a hankering. “Deal,” she said. “And then maybe you can teach me how to make one of your dals?”

We might both come out of this pandemic a few pounds heavier, but we will also be closer than ever. 

Homemade potato gnocchi with sunflower seed pesto

Ingredients

Serves 2

For the gnocchi:

6 medium potatoes, preferably red

1 cup all-purpose flour or farina 00 (NOT buckwheat!)

A pinch of salt  

For the pesto:

A handful of fresh basil

¼ cup sunflower seeds

1 clove of garlic, peeled and sliced

3 generous spoons of olive oil (around 50ml)

A handful of spring onions, green top only

Juice of half a lemon

Directions

1. First up, make the pesto: simply place all the ingredients in a food processor, and blitz till you get the consistency you like. Set aside. 
2. Scrub the potatoes and place them, skin-on, in a pot with water (keeping the skin will help them retain their water). Bring to the boil and cook, partially covered, until the potatoes are easily pierced with a fork, about 35 minutes.
3. Drain the potatoes and let them cool. Once easy to handle, peel the skin and start mashing the potatoes. A ricer would be even better, as it makes fluffier potatoes and therefore lighter gnocchi, but a masher or the back of a fork will do, too. 
4. Spread a generous sprinkle of flour on a work surface, then add your mash potatoes and start kneading them with both hands, gradually adding more flour to form a smooth, gooey dough. This should take no more than 5 minutes: the longer you work your dough, the more flour you’ll need and the heavier the gnocchi will be, so keep the process short. 
5. Dust the dough some more, then start cutting it into pieces, which you’ll set on the side of your work surface. One by one, start rolling the pieces into oblong ropes, around 2cm thick, flouring them as needed. 
6. Slice the ropes into small, chunky dough balls – these are your gnocchi. Place them on a plate lined with more flour to prevent them from sticking, and repeat till you’ve cut all the ropes. 
7. Bring a pot of salted water to the boil over a high heat. Drop the gnocchi in, a few at a time, stirring gently and continuously with a wooden spoon. The gnocchi should cook for about 1 minute. Once they rise to the surface, they’re done.
8. Remove them from the water, drain them, and transfer on a plate. Keep cooking the remaining gnocchi. When all the gnocchi are done, mix in your pesto, and stir gently until they’re well sauced. If needed, add a protein – I did shrimps, flash fried in a pan with lemon, salt and pepper. 

Risotto verde

Ingredients

Serves 2, abundantly  

1 cup carnaroli rice 

2 courgettes, finely sliced

1 carrot, finely sliced

1 brown onion, finely chopped

2 cups of vegetable stock

Salt

Pepper

¼ cup olive oil

A generous chunk of parmesan, or alternatively, any easy-to-melt cheese of your choice – Manchego, Edam, cheddar 

Directions 

1. If you have a good enough food processor (my hand blender didn’t quite cut it), blitz the onion, carrot and courgettes together into smaller pieces (but make sure they don’t turn into soup). Pour the mix into a pot with some olive oil and stir often, until the vegetables start to soften, 6-8 minutes. If they’re still firm, cook until they’re almost melting.
2. Add the risotto rice and stir well to coat. Turn the heat to medium and continue stirring (that’s the secret of all good risottos). As the grains turn translucent around the edges, start adding in the vegetable stock with a ladle. Allow the liquid to absorb fully before adding more, then continue pouring the stock and stirring. The process should take around 20-30 minutes, and you might not need all the stock. 
3. Taste to check the seasoning, adding salt if needed. Once the rice is tender but not mushy, remove from the heat. 
4. Add cheese and stir until melted. Serve. 

Lemon cake 

Ingredients

Makes a small cake in a 6 x 2 inch round tin 

2 eggs

180 grams all-purpose flour

50 ml rapeseed oil or sunflower oil

170 grams sugar (I used coconut sugar)

Juice of 2 lemons

Zest of 1 unwaxed lemon

1 tsp baking powder

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C fan / 200°C / 400°F gas.
2. Sift together the flour, lemon zest and baking powder into a large bowl. Set aside.
3. In another bowl, combine the eggs and sugar and beat vigorously with a whisk until well combined. Add the lemon juice and oil. 
4. Make a well in the flour mixture and add the wet mixture. Fold to form a soft cake batter. 
5. Line the cake tin with parchment paper (or some flour and oil), then pour in the mixture.
6. Place on the middle shelf of the oven for 30-35 minutes, then leave to cool completely in the tin.  

Recipes courtesy of Marianna Cerini