Sunday some friends invited us over to eat lunch, and since they are excellent cooks we quickly agreed. We started the morning by going to a monastery that overlooks Napoli. WOW!! It’s so beautiful there. A completely different view of the city.
The picture to the left has Mt. Vesuvius in the background. That’s the volcano that wiped out Pompeii in 70 A.D.
The picture on the right has the island of Ischia in the background (for those of you who read the blog Big Waves, that’s where that “incident” occurred).

From the heights of the monastery we headed back down to start on lunch. Gnocchi, potato pasta, is a huge dish here on Sundays. Our friend Pepe wanted me to learn how to make it so into the kitchen I went. I am going to briefly explain the process so you can better appreciate the two hours it took to make the gnocchi. Well, I guess if you want to get technical about it, it takes longer than that because you have to begin by making a red sauce. When I make it, I let it cook for two hours or so…Pepe let his cook for six hours!! But back to the gnocchi itself. You first boil the potatoes with the skin and then peel the potatoes. They had cooked 2 kilos of potatoes. Then you press them and you will have a mound of potatoe strings like in the picture. Then, you put salt on them and start needing in flour. Two kilos of potatoes equals 2 kilos of flour. Talk about a tiring process.
Then you roll out the flour and start cutting off little tiny pieces. You boil it for about 5 minutes, drain, and stir in some mozzarella and sauce and the result is nothing but goodness all the way down.
I am including a picture of me eating octopus just so my family will believe that I tried it. I will not be trying it again.