Roasted Chicken In Potato Gravy, Homemade Potato Gnocchi, Lima Beans And Corn

There are some times when my foodie sensors spike and I have ‘visions of chefery’. This time I had visions of roast chicken with homemade potato gnocchi and vegetables. Vegetables, meaning whatever’s in the fridge. The gnocchi (potato dumplings) was definitely the star of the show, though, here’s the play-by-play:

First thing’s first, I had to prep, stuff and season the bird and get it out of the way. I used some regular Stove Top stuffing mix, but of course, I had to dress it up some: I chopped up some bacon, fried it in a skillet and sauteed some onions and celery. I don’t like touching raw meat, I’m kind of OCD when it comes to that, I wash my hands about 20 times when I cook. So you’re no going to find me rubbing butter on that chicken with my bare hand. I just melted some butter in a pan, added seasoning to it and drench it on top of the chicken. NOTE: I always bake my birds dark-meat-up. The dark meat is moist enough to be on top, with the drier white meat at the bottom, it’ll get all of the juice from the pan. The slice potatoes at the bottom of the pan were just  to be a base for the potato gravy. (Potatoes are also a good way to gauge when the meat is done, if you cut big enough piece they’ll take the same amount of time to cook.)

Homemade gnocchi or dumplings is something that everyone can make, it’s pretty easy, it just takes time. What I do is take a box of instant mash potatoes, any ole box. Put the flakes in a bowl and add half of the water suggested for the mash potato directions. It should be doughy,  but tough. Then I just start rolling little balls out of the dough. Admittedly, I should have had double the amount of gnocchi balls, but I was experimenting and being lazy.

After all of the dumplings was prepped, I dropped them in boiling hot water for a couple of minutes to try to solidify them further. Some of the gnocchi sheds in the water, that’s how you know it’s time to take it out, but save the water, it can be used as the potato gravy base for the chicken.

I added some garlic and a bay leaf to the leftover onions and celery from the stuffing. I was afraid that if I cooked the gnocchi on the stove top, in a pan, it would disassemble or be soggy, so I just put it in a roasting pan, added water and slipped it in the oven.