A laundry day, Getting ready to travel and Gnocchi’s. 01-19-15

We haven’t been doing anything exciting the last couple of days.
On Saturday Patti did laundry and I did house work. We went to the Mountain Quail for the Prime Rib special.

Sunday:
We started getting things ready for a trip to Tucson and Tombstone.
We are leaving Quartzsite tomorrow (Tuesday) morning early.
We will meet Suzanne and Roy on highway 95 at mile marker 99 and head south to Interstate 8 where we will turn east and drive to Tucson. We will spend around three days in Tucson. From there we will travel to Tombstone  where we will spend about a week showing Suzanne and Roy some of the trails and other stuff in that area.
From Tombstone, we will head north to the Florence/Coolidge area. We plan to spend about a month checking out some jeep trails around there. After that we are not sure where we will go but we expect to be back in Quartzsite some time in March.
Of course all our plans are written in Jell-O.

Gnocchi’s

I decided to make Gnocchi,s (Italian potato dumplings) for dinner.
Of course I didn’t actually make the Gnocchi’s. I used the ones that I purchased at the Dollar Tree for a buck.

They are actually very good.

I wanted to see if I could make the sauce that my Italian mother used to make for the Gnocchi’s. I was working from memory so I wasn’t really sure if I remembered all the ingredients.
I remember her telling me that she used butter, garlic and tomato paste but I don’t remember anything else.
This is what I did.
First I got some water boiling for the dumplings.
Then, I heated a cube of butter and some olive oil in a sauce pan, I added some finely chopped onion and some chopped garlic to the butter and sautéed them for a while. I then added some salt, dried basil and oregano to the mix. After the onion and garlic were cooked for a while I added about a tablespoon of tomato paste. When The Gnocchi’s were ready I drained them and added the sauce, some grated parmesan cheese and served them. They looked right (unfortunately I didn’t think to take a picture) and tasted good but they weren’t the same as mom’s. They were missing something.
Maybe one of my siblings can tell me what I left out or did wrong.
I still have two packages of Gnocchi’s left.

Today we have to dump the waste tanks and get the electric meter read so we can pay the bill. I will put the tow bar on the jeep and wash the windshield on the RV.
We will disconnect the power and water so I can go get an early start tomorrow. I have to get the propane tank and the gas tank filled in the morning and will have to get that done as early as possible because after about 9:00 all the gas stations are a zoo with so many people here for the big RV show.

I guess the next post will be from Tucson in a couple of days.