When people discover you have a food blog, suddenly everyone has a great idea for what you should cook next. I get a whole lot of (well-intentioned) requests for things like gluten-free baking ideas, cute holiday treats, and homemade girl scout cookies/bloomin’ onions/pumpkin spice lattes/etc. In other words, I often find myself gently reminding folks that I’m capable of eating an entire baguette on my way home from the grocery store so gluten-free baking is really not something I have a huge interest in, that “cute” is something I do very poorly, and there’s this special place called Pinterest where I’m sure those “top-secret” recipes you want me to recreate already exist.
So when my boss approached me with, “d’you know what would be great for your blog?” I braced myself and started thinking of ways to let him down easy and hold on to my job. But he followed it up with, “Parisian gnocchi. I think you readers would really like it. Do you want my recipe?”
Umm…yes, absolutely! Finally, a suggestion I didn’t have to politely turn away!
(Okay, fine. If you don’t know me in real life and you’ve never wandered over to my about page, I suppose it bears mentioning that my “real” job is waiting tables, so it helps that my boss happens to be the chef of a French restaurant.)
So armed with Vincent’s recipe, I went home to make Parisian gnocchi. Parisian gnocchi are unlike the Italian gnocchi you’re probably more familiar with. Instead of relying on potatoes, Parisian gnocchi are made with cheese-enriched pâte à choux, which is the same type of pastry dough that’s used make gougères, profiteroles, and other such treats. Yup, copious amounts of cheese, butter, and egg–leave it to the French. The cheesy choux pastry is piped into simmering water and poached. From there, you can go ahead and eat them or shock them in cold water, then sauté and sauce them later. I’ll walk you through the how-to and show you how I served mine.
To tell you the truth, I thought twice about bothering to post this potato and fennel soup. I made it, took pictures of it, singlehandedly ate almost the whole batch, and then talked myself out of sharing it with you all. I decided it was too basic, too boring, not worthy of your time. 
Sometimes this whole food blogging business can be downright painful. See, I’m sitting here at my computer, remembering what these blondies smelled like as they were baking…like buttery, caramelly, brown sugary goodness, straight from the heavens. And now instead of writing, I’m just staring at the crackled tops of these bars, thinking about their perfectly chewy edges and just how addictively sweet/soft/salty/crunchy/chewy they were .