Dough
2 cups all purpose flour
2 eggs
1 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup whole milk
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
3 quarts water
2 tablespoons salt
1 tablespoons melted butter
Sauce
2 tablespoons of unsalted butter
1 bunch asparagus, cut on the bias into 1-inch pieces
1 1/2 cups thinly sliced button mushrooms
1/2 teaspoons red pepper flakes
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon minced garlic
1 teaspoon sugar
1/4 cup tomato sauce
1 cup half and half
1/2 cup provolone cheese
1/2 cup Parmesan cheese
Combine the flour, eggs, salt, milk, and nutmeg in a bowl or stand mixer. Mix until a soft, very sticky dough forms. Cover with a towel or plastic wrap and set aside for 15 minutes. Add salt to water and bring to a boil. Form the spaetzle with a spaetzle-maker utensil available online; by scraping the dough through a colander with a flexible spatula; or scraping from a plate into the boiling water with an oiled knife. Once the dumplings rise to the surface of the water, allow them to cook for 1 minute. Remove with a slotted spoon into a clean bowl with the melted butter, stirring to coat so they don’t stick to each other.
For sauce: In a large saute pan over high heat, melt butter. Add asparagus, mushrooms, red pepper flake, and black pepper; cook for about 2 minutes. Lower heat to medium and add remaining ingredients. Cook until it’s barely starting to simmer – DO NOT BOIL or the sauce could break. Stir in the spaetzle, top with more Parmesan cheese if desired, and serve immediately.
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Having been raised in the small town of Ste. Genevieve, it wasn’t really a holiday if we didn’t have the local delicacy of liver dumplings on the table. Many people outside of the region will have never heard of this dish, and if they don’t turn their nose up at the unappetizing name they certainly almost always would at the off-putting color and flat out ugly shape of this surprisingly delicious side dish. Local parish cookbooks are filled with family recipes and secrets for liver dumplings sometimes affectionally called nifflys. Ste. Genevieve restaurants and delis sell this local treasure by the quart.
I married an out-of-towner, moved north, and generated offspring that would rather starve then eat liver, yet I was determined to keep this unique dumpling (technically spaetzle) tradition alive. My pan fried, visually appealing and liver free spaetzle recipe with asparagus and mushrooms is my homage to my grandma who would stand for hours over a pot of bubbling water to make sure our holiday menu always included the gravy laden treasure that we had come to expect.
