potato sage Gnocchi with pumpkin, hazelnuts, bacon, and brown butter

After eleven months to the day, Im back up in Herr with some bomb vittles. I've had some great food to eat since I last wrote, moved to Colorado and am now back in Seattle, working at Beechers Cheese. I lost interest in beer and cheese for awhile there, but I'm finding my palate is getting excited by it again. I have the chance to sample many good cheeses and have alredy found some decent pairings which I will formalize on the blog soon.

So I served this amazing dish with a Dog Fish Head Punkin Ale, which is the best pumpkin beer I've had, its a brown flavored with cinnamin, allspice, nutmeg, and brown sugar. It is mildly hopped, and has a true pumkin flavor with restrained spices and some malt notes showing through. I also had it with pumkin bread and this was amazing. I wana do pumpkin cookies with blank slate or marscapone flavored with rum and pumpkin spices.

So the dish was the first I made out of the Wildwood cookbook which is an excellent Pacific Northwest cookbook split into regions and types of foods (wilammete spring veggies, Yaquina bay seafood) Some of it is a little out of reach for me, but sounds amazing (Red wine braised duck legs with cherries, parsnip puree and balsalmic roasted pears.

I made the Gnocchi the day before, grating organic Yukon golds into semolina and seasoning with fresh sage, cayenne, allspice, nutmeg.

I prepared some brown butter, one of my favorite ingredients, and added cooked bacon, lemon juice, hazelnuts, parsley and a roasted and course cut sugar pumkin. This went on top of the Gnocchi with some Parm Reggie. The flavors blended perfectly, it tastes like Fall. the crunchy roasted hazels contrasted the soft sweet pumkins held together by carmelly brown butter with bacon. I feel the sage should have been cooked into the brown butter to bring out a stronger flavor and the bacon should be replace by Pancetta. The Gnocchi were amazing and the beer went along nicely, even though it couldn't real match the intensity richness of the dish.