Sweet potato gnocchi さつまいものニョキ

Recently, we cooked a large pork roast and some Japanese sweet potatoes on the Weber grill. My wife made her version of mashed sweet potatoes with butter, soy sauce and any juice accumulated on the plate in which the roast was resting. We enjoyed the slices of roasted pork and mashed sweet potatoes for dinner. Then my wife made gnocchi from the leftover mashed sweet potatoes.

Ingredients:
16 oz. of mashed potatoes (3 cups)
4 oz. of AP flour (3/4 cup)
1 egg
1 tsp. salt

Directions:
Press the mashed potatoes through a sieve to remove any residual lumps (#1). Add the flour and gently mix with a fork. Add the egg and salt and again gently mix with a fork until everything comes together into a dough (#2). Gently roll into 1/2 inch diameter logs (#3). Cut the rolled logs into individual pieces of the desired size (#4). The pieces can be rolled on the back of a fork to make ridges to better hold the sauce but that doesn’t work out so well for us so our gnocchi pieces generally don't have any ridges.

Fill the dutch oven with water. Add 1 Tbs. Salt and several bay leaves. Bring the water to a boil. Lower the heat and add the gnocchi to the water. Gently heat them just below the boil for a few minutes until the gnocchi float to the surface (#5). Remove them from the water and put into whatever sauce you are using. Or for later use put them in a bowl and coat with olive oil to prevent them from sticking together (#6).

This was a good gnocchi. You can really taste the sweet potato. My wife fried up all of them and we froze what was left over from the dinner we ate the day she made them. In this state they are very easy to toaster oven as a side dish for dinner. Toaster-ovened they were as good as when they were just fried.