Tonight we will be making a red wine reduction with onions and mushrooms.

Better than it looks

I decided to try to make gnocchi as well, with limited success. You can find a better recipe than I could give you here.

Mine ended up slightly less…coherent that I had hoped.

But for this post, I want to focus on the sauce I made to go along with the my gnocchi of dubious consistency. To make this, you will need mushrooms, onions and a largish glass of red wine.  Begin by sweating the mushrooms, by sauteing them in a dry sauce pot until they begin to produce liquid. It will honestly look like they are sweating.  Its kinda cool to watch. The reason for doing this is that it facilitates the dispersal of the mushroom flavors into the rest of the dish.

You can see the sweat much better in person

Once the mushrooms are good and brown, add in a finely diced onion and mix it in. Now let it sit.

No seriously, don’t mess with it. Just add some healthy seasoning (salt, pepper, garlic and basil)

So hard to resist stirring!

 Now add your glass of wine and bring it to a boil. Let it simmer until it is reduced to almost a paste.

The wine is, of course, only ever used for cooking.

 Mix in your gnocchi and serve

Take your veggies:

Looking so fresh in the morning light

And cut them up

If anyone has a suggestion for tearless onion cutting, please share it.  Please

 Cook them with garlic, salt and pepper

Can I just start saying gsp?  Would anyone understand what I mean? Probably not.

Next take your eggs, about two for every person you will be cooking for.

One of these things is not like the others.

 Beat them up a little. Just enough sos that they gets the message.

And the moral is that we are all the same on the inside

 Add them to the vegetables, add more seasoning and scramble until cooked

Scrambled!

Serve hot with sriracha sauce, hot sauce or ketchup. Or just plain

Yet another thing that tasted better than it looks.

Ok. Whatever you do, don’t follow this recipe.  I was thoroughly unsatisfied with the result, however, it is what I made so post I must.

First some explanation.  When altering a baking recipe (Not advised! The margins of error in baking are very small.) to add cocoa powder, you must add more butter, baking soda and sugar to compensate for the drying and acerbic aspects of the cocoa.

I did not add enough of any of them, apparently

 Anyway, follow the instructions under the lid of the oatmeal.

Cream together (meaning, mix until creamy) softened butter and your sugars.

This might be too creamy

Beat in eggs.

Two of them.

Add your powders, replacing a quarter cup of flour with cocoa powder

Chocolaty!

Pour in oats,

Mix thoroughly.

Ball into one inch masses and place on a cookie sheet.

Yum…?

 I got bored after one sheet so I made a sheet cake out of the rest

While those are baking, you can clean up the inevitable mess.

Cocoa powder everywhere!

I made a peanut butter sauce for my bars

And by that, I mean I melted some peanut butter.

 And poured it over the completed bars

Add some sugar over the tops of the cookies to try to make up for the fact that I added no where near enough the first time.

Seriously, don’t try this

Although the bars aren’t awful frozen.