Don't let professional foodies make you think that any untested ingredient can effortlessly become the crux of an amazing dish. Those guys fail just as often as amateurs like you and I do—we just have the cojones to admit to it in public. Like teenage girls who've had their hearts broken by an unrequited crush, we talk about our misery and misfortunes until we're blue in the face and have cleansed our spirits of the associated trauma. Then we move on to the next hazard.
So let me tell you about the horrible purple yam gnocchi I concocted on Sunday. I'd never made regular potato-based gnocchi before, and if pressed, I wouldn't even call myself much of a gnocchi enthusiast. Like tofu, I think of it as one of those foods that tastes only as good as whatever sauce is clinging to it, and so it remains a dish which I harbor no strong feeling for, positive or negative. However, I'm a big fan of an exotic ice cream that's made with the Filipino purple yam called Ube, and in doing some research on it, I came across the excellent Burnt Lumpia blog, which offered a number of tantalizing sweet and savory recipes based on the curious ingredient. (Cake! Pancakes! And... gnocchi!)
It turns out that fresh Ube can be difficult to come by, even in New York. But packages of the shredded and frozen variety can be found in Asian markets, so my local Vietnamese produce hut seemed like a reasonable place to look for it. (Remember, though, that Ube is the Filipino word, so my grocer initially didn't get what I was asking for. I'm not sure what the Vietnamese translation is, but when I said "frozen purple yams", she was immediately able to point me in the right direction.)
Armed with a buck fifty's worth of purple goodness, I skipped home, cranked up the air conditioner, and relaxed with the latest True Blood DVD from Netflix. At that point, a triumphant dinner seemed like a pretty solid bet.
My confidence began dissipating shortly after I actually began my prep work. I'd let the package of shredded yam defrost on the counter, and I could tell that I'd need to drain some of the excess liquid 
out before marrying it to the egg and flour mixture. As such, I emptied the package into a clean dishtowel, which Alex proceeded to ring out over the sink and which rewarded us with a peculiar looking stream of dark purple water spiraling down the drain. After arriving at a consistency which we agreed resembled freshly grated yams, we piled it onto a floured cutting board in volcano formation, cracked the egg into the crater as directed, and began massaging in the flour.
Right away, I figured out it was still way too juicy. But since we'd already mixed in the other ingredients, further draining was no longer an option, leaving the addition of extra flour as our only way to achieve the proper consistency. Negotiating the sticky pile of purple goo before me was an exercise in futility, and ultimately, I think we used 1/2 cup more flour than recommended by the recipe. But if you'd seen the way it was sticking to my hands (I almost lost my wedding ring while fighting to scrape the gluey and uncooperative dough from my fingers), I think you'd have agreed that more starch was the best of our limited options.
After working the dough into a manageable blob and forming it into four cylindrical ropes, I began slicing off small nuggets which were then rolled off the tip of a fork to supply the sauce-grabbing topography that gnocchi is known for. After three minutes in a pot of boiling water, they rose to the surface and seemed ready for the delicious-smelling sage and browned butter sauce that Alex had been whipping up on the sidelines. We were hungry. And excited.
A sure sign that a meal isn't what you'd hoped for is when you end up eating it over the sink while your wife politely pokes at hers on the other side of the kitchen. Though it was definitely cooked through, the gnocchi had a tough, rubbery texture that even the prepared kind from the supermarket can't count as a detriment. Any sweet notes we'd hoped the yams would offer were totally washed out by the blandness of all the excess flour, though the browned butter and sage/garlic combo had an appealing freshness that would have been a perfect complement to a better pasta. We relented after a few mouthfuls and instead focused on our salads. Later that night, I fell asleep on the couch while watching the end of the True Blood DVD and woke up feeling like I'd swallowed several bricks.
In spite of this disappointment, I'm not giving up on the purple yam just yet. My quest to locate a market that sells fresh ones may lead me into an all new series of sketchy neighborhoods, and really, isn't that one of the great rewards of urban living? As I map out the search, I'm comforted by my feeling that the excessive juiciness of the frozen kind will be an asset when I try out the pancake recipe. Yes, damnit, I am going to make purple pancakes. What kind of a joker wouldn't be intrigued by that?
