Tasty Tuesdays - Potato & Spinach Gnocchi

Hey there – just a quick note before I get started. I know I’ve only been writing for the last 6 days but I may already be seeing a few issues with blogging every night – namingly, I have no time for anything else (TV shows, YouTube videos, sleeping….I may need more than 5-6 hours) so I am going to be switching to a fortnightly pattern with a week off between each set. I will keep up Wednesday and Sunday’s entries, but that should also allow me more time to read the books I’m reviewing (as impressed as I am with the speed that I read Jane Eyre). And so, after this week I will be taking a break and resuming the following Monday. Now, on with the recipe!

This one comes to you from What’s Cooking’s Potatoes cookbook by Jenny Stacey and is the perfect accompaniment to a variety of sauce-based dishes. I’m focusing on jazzing up your classic spaghetti and meatballs, but you can use them as a side to things like bolognaise, stew or a hearty stroganoff.

The best place to start (as indeed the recipe below will tell you) is to prepare your potatoes. 300g/10 ½ oz is roughly 2 medium potatoes and these make up half of the gnocchi. When cooked and mashed, they might not look like enough to feed 4 (or 3 if you’re hungry), but once you start adding the rest of the ingredients, it’ll start to bulk up. The recipe suggests blanching the spinach in hot water, but this means a lot more squeezing out of excess liquid than if you put it into the microwave (2 ½ - 3 minutes with a couple of tablespoons of water depending on your microwave settings). Then you’ll want to make sure your work surface is well floured because the instructions do not prepare you for how messy things are about to get (and that’s not just because of the egg yolk). As you add the flour bit by bit, you’ll be folding the potato/spinach mixture over on itself, inside out, upside down, and quickly this will begin to coat your fingers. It can be a somewhat impatient and fiddly process but by the time all 125g/4 ½ oz/1 cup of flour have been incorporated, your mixture should be considerably firmer and less sticky. For my second attempt, I added an extra 34g/1.2 oz/ ¼ cup of flour which produced a more kneadable dough and firmer gnocchi when cooked (compared to the sticky dough and watery gnocchi I got first time around). You can add less or omit the extra flour to suit your preference. When your dough is made and the gnocchi shaped into between 24 and 40 balls, you can move onto the sauce (the recipe suggests making it while cooking the gnocchi, but I feel it needs more attention than that).

If you’re using pre-made meatballs – as I do – cook them now (the ones I use take roughly 25 minutes in the oven), but these are usually simple to make from scratch as well. Standard ingredients include minced meat, fried onion, breadcrumbs, and seasoning although you can use whichever recipe you like. All the sauce ingredients can go into one pan (saucepan, frying pan, wok, whatever heatproof pan you have laying around) at the same time which makes this step so much easier. I like to add 2-3 tbsp of red wine (if you have it) as this helps not only with flavour but to loosen the sauce later if it becomes too thick. I also switch out the 2 shallots for a small red onion and, for added flair, use a 300g jar of bolognaise sauce and half a vegetable stock cube in place of the passata. When the meatballs are done cooking, these can be added directly into the sauce to absorb some of the flavour, which just leaves the gnocchi to cook.

From my experience, from the moment you drop the gnocchi into the boiling water, they only take about 3 ½ minutes to start rising to the top; if you leave them much longer, depending on how much flour you used, they can start to become soggy. Drain each batch and keep them warm before serving topped with the meatballs, sauce and little dusting of Parmesan cheese, as well as a lightly dressed salad and some crusty Mediterranean bread.

 

POTATO & SPINACH GNOCCHI (serves 4)

for the gnocchi

300g/10 ½ oz floury potatoes, diced

175g/6oz spinach

1 egg yolk

1 tsp olive oil

125g/4 ½ oz/1 cup plain flour

Salt and pepper

Spinach leaves to garnish

 

for the sauce

1 tbsp olive oil

2 shallots, chopped

1 garlic clove, crushed

300ml/ ½ pint/ 1 ¼ cups passata

2 tsp soft light brown sugar

1.       Cook the diced potatoes in a saucepan of boiling water for 10 minutes until cooked through. Drain and mash the potatoes.

2.       Meanwhile, in a separate pan, blanch the spinach in a little boiling water for 1-2 minutes. Drain well and shred the leaves.

3.       Transfer the mashed potato to a lightly floured chopping board and make a well in the centre. Add the egg yolk, olive oil, spinach and a little of the flour and quickly mix the ingredients into the potato, adding more flour as you go, until you have a firm dough. Divide the mixture into very small dumplings.

4.       Cook the gnocchi in batches in a saucepan of boiling salted water for about 5 minutes or until they rise to the top of the pan.

5.       Meanwhile, make the sauce. Put the oil, shallots, garlic, passata and sugar into a saucepan and cook over a low heat for 10-15 minutes or until the sauce has thickened.

6.       Drain the gnocchi using a perforated spoon and transfer to warm serving dishes. Spoon the sauce over the gnocchi and garnish with the fresh spinach leaves.