It was a unanimous decision amongst my family that a feast we ate in Florence was the highlight of our recent trip to Italy. We sat down at a nice table in the corner of a crowded restaurant and my sister immediately charmed the waiter with her fluency in the language she was able to pick up during her semester there. She told him we were ready to eat and drink whatever they were willing to bring, and I think they took it as a challenge. We were then brought course after course of amazing food, and enough wine for easily double the amount of people. When we got home, we wanted to share the experience of the feast with other relatives and loved ones who weren’t as lucky to be there with us that night. There won’t be recipes here like a normal blog post, I just wanted to share scenes from that beautiful day with you all.

The premise of this dish was to to create a textural study between 3 different gummy ingredients, braised octopus, potato gnocchi, and korean rice cake. All 3 of these things can remind me of each other, so I thought it would be fun to put them all together in a korean flavored sauce. It came out pretty tasty in the end, but I don’t feel that I fully achieved what I was going for. The main issue was the size differences between the 3 main ingredients. I was aiming to make them all a similar size and shape but failed. Regardless, if you like octopus you will enjoy this dinner, but on a normal night I would make it with either gnocchi or rice cake, and not both.