Kneading Club #5: pillowy gnocchi

on hitting the wall, a recipe for chestnut gnocchi di patate in tomato sauce, a list of crafty ideas to do at home

Preamble:

Salut, you. Some exciting post arrived last Thursday: proofs for my novel, Breaststrokes! Words on pages, a book in my hands — I can’t quite get my head around it, but they’re pink and the photo says they exist.
I hope you’ll consider pre-ordering a copy from your favourite bookshop (it really helps!) and I can’t wait for you to read.
Thank you,
Margaux

---

Now, this week’s newsletter:

The other day, I was on the phone with a dear friend – someone who acknowledges my fears but doesn’t let me spiral with them – and she said: ‘Are you ok? You sound a bit flat.’ I was flat. We stayed quiet after she had spoken; I remember the seconds because silences always feel heavier on the phone, like when someone is clearly talking on a video call yet you can’t hear their voice. Then I explained my thoughts: ‘You know how people who run marathons talk about hitting the thirty-kilometre wall? This is where I am.’ A runner ‘hits the wall’ in a race when they’ve exhausted their reserves of glycogen, which causes muscle pains, blurry vision, fluctuating heart rates and other symptoms. This is fatigue: the body alerts the senses that the mind has run too fast too quickly.

I read online that it may only take a snack to start running again, or a short break, or a longer break followed by a series of intervals. I don’t think that one needs to be running a marathon to hit a wall either. Certainly not at the end of 2023. Whether the wall stands before health, career, a relationship, a project or a run indeed, whether the wall is a weak fence or cement, the wall is an obstacle rather than a cul-de-sac.

In an interview with Hattie Crisell of In Writing, the wise and observant writer George Saunders said:

If you don’t feel creative, maybe you can be reactive instead. Don’t get hung up on how full of ideas you are or aren’t. Read what you’ve got so far and see if you can just react to it, and move it on in that way. ‘Lowering the bar on artistic anxiety is the way to get on top of your writing.’

In response to reading the quote, I noticed that when I’m working on a piece of writing, there comes a moment when I jump off my chair impulsively; I walk around the room, sit back, type that sentence. The sentence I was scared to write. Perhaps this says more about me and that I respond to emotions physically, but it also shows that it’s ok to acknowledge that something looks insurmountable. To brace oneself for the obstacle: to plot a reaction rather than indulge a quick solution. I don’t think the assessment has to be pessimistic either, but it speaks of endurance. I assume a marathon runner would want to study the race map ahead of it, to consider elevation levels, road or sandy grounds – and most of us would say: ‘fair enough!’

My brilliant friend ended our call by saying that it doesn’t matter how long it’ll take me to reach the 31^st kilometre, but she bets it’ll be brighter when I get there. I didn’t respond to that comment at the time because I was tired and moany, and while I still don’t know what it’ll look like over there, I’ve understood that I’ll need to find my own pace to get there in the first instance. ‘–for unless I am myself, I am nobody,’ as Virginia Woolf wrote. So I’m writing this to you, passing on a baton, because self-care doesn’t go far without mutual aid either.

I also read that one of the keys to avoid hitting the wall is nutrition to keep glycogen levels high. So, shall we eat something?

raw gnocchi

This month, I continue to cook for anyone who finds the holiday seasons tough, and this week is for a reliable plate of gnocchi. It seems that I often return to their forgiving dough when I’m hitting the wall – the first pasta I made at home on my own (after a heartbreak, predictably); the pasta we made with my flatmates at the end of the first week of lockdown; Claude’s butternut squash gnocchi last December; gnocchi di polenta around silence – so I hope that they’ll be good pals to you too. Recipe for chestnut gnocchi di patate, served in a tomato sauce (measurements are for one):

150g floury potatoes, skin on (make sure the potatoes are the same size so they’ll cook at the same pace)
1 egg yolk
30/60g white flour
2 or 3 chestnuts, grated
tomato sauce
1 garlic clove, skin on and crushed
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp tomato purée
fresh basil
salt and pepper

Bring water to the boil and cook the potatoes with their skin on. Leave them aside until they’ll be cold enough to handle. Peel the potatoes and mash them with a fork. Add the egg yolk, salt, pepper and the grated chestnuts. Mix with your hands.

Roll the dough into logs. Cut each log into 1-1.5 cm bits. Make flat balls with the dough bits inside the palm of your hands, then slide each one of them over the tip of a fork to give the gnocchi a pillow shape. It’s a forgiving recipe: you may stop at the ball shape or simply make little squares, but you’ll want to have pasta of the same size so they’ll cook well.

In a large casserole, heat up some olive oil, add a sprig of basil and the garlic clove. Swirl around until fragrant. Pour in the tomato sauce, add sugar, salt, pepper and tomato purée, simmer. In the meantime, bring water to the boil and cook the gnocchi until they’ll float. Remove the garlic and basil from the tomato sauce, pour the gnocchi into the sauce. Serve with fresh basil leaves on top.

the said gnocchi

Thank you for sending me your crafty projects! In no particular order, including some of my recommendations, here are some ideas:

• Paint by numbers;

• listen to an album from the first to last song;

• wool and the Gang knitting kits for beginners;

• remember those?

• Brew your own beer;

• beads necklace and other jewellery making;

• bring papier mâché back; play-dough sculptures, baked in the oven?

• Pottery making kits;

• oyster mushrooms growing kit;

• a few of you are into origami;

• a subscription to Story Club with George Saunders; 

• or some focus time with Writer’s Hours. 

• The equivalent of this book for wherever you live, and preserve some leaves and plants.

Next week will be for something sweet and French.

Take care, à vite,

Margaux 

---

Thanks for being here with me! The Onion Papers is a reader-supported publication; feel free to like this post and to forward it to a friend or two.

If you enjoy the work that I do here, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription and you’ll get access to the full archive and future Monday recipes and notes on craft. It costs £4 per month, so £1 per newsletter. I’ll do my best to make it fun and feeding, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

---