Trial Balloon

Tonight I made malfatti, per a recipe in The Times Magazine. Basically, it's as if I took the filling for spinach-stuffed shells and made them into dumplings, par-boiled them, then covered them in home-made tomatoe sauce and parmesan, and broiled until I felt it was done. What did I learn? That I needed to get much more water out of the cooked spinach than I did, to make it feasible to mold the spinach dough into "sausage-shaped dumplings." As it is, I simply dropped the dumplings by spoonsful into boiling water. So they looked a little odd.

Yum. Also fairly permissible on Weight Watchers (I'm down 10 pounds from when I started, which, given that I've been trying to behave myself during the holidays, is damned near miraculous). Also fairly filling. A fine combination.