For some unknown reason, Monday is fish night in our home. Fish is, of course, brain food. If only the weekly infusion would wake my own “little grey matter,” as Poirot puts it. This week I turned to shrimp.

Sometime ago I gleaned a recipe that made good use of gnocchi, those little puffs of potato. Actually, some cooking show a while ago guided me to a method to cook this “pasta.” The chef filled a sauté pan with water and brought it to a boil, dropped in the gnocchi, and waited for them to gently drift to the surface. Then he waited a bit more for them to cook through to their soft goodness.

In the meantime, somewhere else I collected a recipe that paired sautéd mushrooms with the gnocchi. That’s how my go-to recipe for gnocchi now. The other night, fish night, I added shrimp to the mushrooms. It’s really quite easy for a quick weeknight dinner.

Gnocchi with Mushrooms and Shrimp. Start by bringing a sauté pan filled with water (add salt if you’d like) to a boil. Add one package of gnocchi and wait til they drift gently to the top. Then wait a while longer for them to puff up and soften.

Rough cut a box of mushrooms (about the size of the gnocchi), put them into a heated sauté pan with a little oil. Let them sit a few minutes to start cooking. I picked up this tip on some other cooking show. Cook some sliced onion, too, if you’d like. Gently toss the mushrooms and cook til a bit browned and nicely softened. Continue cooking as the gnocchi also continue cooking. Before draining the gnocchi, add a few ladles full of water from the gnocchi to the mushrooms. Add the drained gnocchi to the mushrooms, toss, and top with a pound of shelled shrimp; cover and continue cooking over a low heat for just a few minutes for the shrimp to cook.

Baby bok choy braised with thinly sliced onions made the green side dish.

Tuesday, I returned to chicken schnitzel, a dish I learned to cook during the long enforced seclusion known as “The Pandemic” (see July 20, 2020 post). When I opened my pantry drawer with different “bread” crumbs, I saw a smallish jar with crumbs from a bag of tortilla chips. They were saved for just such a cooking excursion, so into the food processer they went. The finished product looked good. The tortilla chips kept their crunch, but the salty, yummy flavor had disappeared. Next time, I’ll return to my variety of bread crumbs with an ample amount of zatar.

Note: Once you’ve dredged your chicken in the egg wash, what do you do with the remaining pool of egg(s)? I turned to my friend and companion, google, to find, yes, you can go ahead and scramble that egg and enjoy.