Day 6: Gnocchi with roast pumpkin, leek, pancetta and feta
I have been curious about trying to make gnocchi for a while. They make it look so easy on TV. It turns out it wasn’t. That, and the timing of this dish, proved to be quite difficult. It tasted lovely though, all of the flavours went really well together.
Gnocchi ingredients
- 750g of Blue Moon potatoes
- 200g of plain flour
- Salt to taste.
I really should have read the recipe more careful as all of them noted to boil the potatoes with the skin on. This one however was made the way ‘normal’ mash is made in this household, peeled and cut into smaller bits, then boiled, drained and mashed.
Make mash potato, gently mix in the flour. if mixture is still sticky, add a little more flour. Pay attention to the amount. Too much flour will make the cooked gnocchi heavy and tough, while too little flour will cause gnocchi to disintegrate during cooking. Split the dough into 4 even bits. Roll one out into a long stick shape and cut into 1 1/2cm shaped bits.
Boil water in a large pan and and add 1/4 of the gnocchi. During the cooking process they will float the surface of the water. For a further 10 seconds continue cooking gnocchi at the surface then remove and drain well.
Unfortunately the gnocchi was cut into bits that were too large and not the 1 1/2cm as suggested above. The overall result wasn’t exactly successful. They came out quite a lot too big and wet looking so they were chucked into the saucepan to dry out a bit.
Ingredients for the main part 1
- One large butternut pumpkin. I think it would have been about 1kg.
- Oil
- Salt and pepper
Oven temp 200C.
Peel the pumpkin and cut into even bits about 1 1/2 cm. What I should have done to reduce the amount of oil in the oven dish was to pour the oil over the pumpkin when it was in the dish. Instead I poured oil on the oven dish then added the pumpkin and pour more oil over. Therefore it was quite a bit more oil than I anticipated. The result was that it roasted a lot quicker than anticipated too.
Ingredients main – part 2
- 1 leek white and light green bits only, sliced
- 3-4 cloves garlic, crushed
- 100g pancetta, coarsely chopped
- 10 large walnuts halved
- 100g of Meredith feta
Slice the leek up, crush the garlic and pancetta and chuck into a non-stick pan and cook on low heat. Just before it’s ready put in the feta to warm up. Them mix it up with the pumpkin and serve with the gnocchi.
You made gnocchi from scratch? Nice work, I’ve never done that. Good call, also, on making 2 pancetta dishes on consecutive days. I’m planning for the week and am trying to pick ingredients that will work in more than one meal.