Gnocchi for Six

Handmade gnocchi is a lot of fun to make, but I am always afraid of it clumping during boiling. (I had one disastrous experiment when I tried a variation of my recipe and I ended up with a mashed mush.) I wanted to make gnocchi with my Pals so I doubled the normal standard recipe, keeping my fingers crossed that I would be able to fit them all in one pot.

To set the stage for dinner, I steamed broccoli and placed it in the bowls. Cream and broccoli go so well together, don't they?

Before dropping the gnocchi in the water, I set up the creamy pesto sauce (discussed in the previous post) to simmer. I put the dumplings directly in the sauce after they floated so that way they would not stick together.

I was so lucky that there was no clumping! It was a bit stressful dropping so many gnocchi into the pot at once (trying not to compress them as I put them into the water) but it ended up even better than I could have hoped.

With any yummy sauce, you need to have some bread to wipe up what is left! I whipped up some bread machine pizza dough and twisted them into breadsticks. The dough was brushed with olive oil and sprinkled with garlic salt before baking.

I am very lucky to have great friends to share wonderful food with. Especially when those friends decide to come out to Evanston to visit. Anyone else want to come to dinner? :)

Pesto

Growing up, I was not a huge fan of pesto. Keith has always loved it, and after meeting him my appreciation grew. We frequently have gnocchi in a creamy pesto sauce, but the best I had ever had was from our cooking class where everything was made fresh. Since we were going to have friends come to town, I thought it would be fun to make gnocchi from scratch with creamy pesto sauce, but I wanted to pre-make the pesto.

This a nut free pesto since one of our friends has an allergy. It contained:

• 4 cups fresh basil leaves
• 1 cup freshly grated parmesan cheese
• 6 teaspoons minced garlic
• 1.5 cup olive oil

Of course we had to test the sauce out to make sure it would be suitable for company. I heated the pesto up in a 1:1 ratio with heavy cream and served on pasta with fresh grated parmesan cheese.

Fauxagna

It is no secret that Keith and I really like Lasagna. It is easy, fun to make, and there are plenty of leftovers. Now that I have a pasta press, it seems silly to me to purchase dry lasagna noodles (I still have to write up my post on my first lasagna from scratch.) Instead, I decided to make a faux lasagna with layers of pasta.

I love caramelized onions, and putting some into baked pasta dishes gives them a wonderful sweet twist. In the pictures above, I am caramelizing two whole onions because I wanted to save some for another dish I would make later this week. I wish that I had used a little less butter, not because of taste but because of health and there was plenty of liquid.

Keith loves garlic bread, and sometimes I'll make it from scratch. Today, I decided to just make some fresh bread to dip in the leftover tomato sauce.

The Francesco Rinaldi Chunky Garden tomato sauce is my favorite. I have no idea why I love it so much, but it really holds up well with a lot of cheese, so it is perfect for baked pasta dishes.

I cooked the pasta for 8 minutes, not the 10-12 recommended on the package because I knew it would cook more in the oven. I layered sauce, noodles and the cheeses. I used whole milk ricotta cheese (yes, I am bad), shredded mozzarella, and some spices.

The caramelized onions were sprinkled on top under the final layer of mozzarella. I only cooked it at 350 for 10-15 minutes since I just wanted to warm things up and let the cheeses melt.

I think the fauxagna was a complete success. Keith had 3 helpings!

Homemade gnocchi

It was time for me to try making homemade gnocchi all by myself. I started with 1lb 9oz of russet potatoes and boiled them until they were soft (30 min).

After they were pealed and put through the ricer, I had 1 lb of potatos to work with for the dough.

It really does look like rice!

For the dough I used 1 lb of the riced potatoes, 2.5 oz flour, 2 tsp salt and 1 egg. This ended up being fairly salty, so the sauce didn't need any additional salt.

I still don't have a gnocchi board, so I scored them with the back of a fork.

I'm not sure the scoring made a huge difference, but it was easy enough to finish rolling out the entire batch of dough.

I wanted to make the gnocchi so badly that I hadn't given much thought to the sauce. I like to use a creamy pesto mix for gnocchi, but I couldn't bring myself to use a packaged sauce on my first batch of homemade gnocchi. I therefore whipped up a simple browned butter sauce.

I thought the packaged gnocchi I bought from Trader Joe's cooked up fast... but man these started floating almost as soon as I had them in the pot! I put them in a bowl to toss with the sauce, but the gnocchi were so soft that some of them got a bit squished. Next time, I'll either put them directly in the pan with the sauce or directly into the serving bowl.

Needless to say, Keith was very excited to come home for dinner. The whole process is so yummy, I know I will be making gnocchi a lot. Soon I'll have to try out some variations and see how well they keep frozen.

Chicken Parmesan

I am thrilled to finally own a meat tenderizer! I'm ready to pound some chicken for the first time to make Chicken Parmesan.

I pounded the chicken breasts inside ziplock bags (where they had defrosted). The breast on the left has been pounded about 1/4 inch thin, the breast on the right is unaltered.

I pan fried the chicken breasts for ~5 minutes on each side.

Our pans are VERY non-stick, so we only needed the tiniest amount of oil.

Our griddle pan hadn't arrived in the mail yet, so I had to use two different pans to cook dinner. Thank goodness these pans are dishwasher safe!

What Italian meal would be complete without garlic bread? I had this in the oven to crisp as the chicken was cooking on the stovetop.

After I put the mozarella cheese on top, I stuck the pans directly in the oven at 300 degrees for a min so the cheese would melt.

This meal was so fast and easy to prepare. I cannot see myself ever using pre-breaded chicken again!

Homemade Pizza

When I make pizza dough, I like to add some Italian spices to help give it some more flavor. I haven't replicated a pizzeria salty crust, but I do make a crust that is good whether you are going for a more classic pizza (like tonight) or fancier with caramelized onions, fresh mozzarella and drizzled balsamic reduction.

Tonight's toppings

Half of the 2lb dough went into tonight's pizza, and the rest into the fridge for another night. I pre-baked the crust at 400 degrees F for a few minutes to crisp up before adding the sauce and other toppings.

The bread maker is my hero, the bread maker is my hero!

Making pizza dough in the bread maker is so simple and easy, that it is never worth buying a frozen pizza ever again. Now that Keith and I are married, we have a lot of awesome appliances. In fact, we have three different ways to make dough (Cuisinart Bread Maker, KitchenAid Mixer and Cuisinart Food Processor).

The bread maker will always be my preferred method for breads (although I never use it to bake the bread.) What are the most valuable features? The heating and kneading cycles to allow the dough to rise... and the delay timer. Since none of the ingredients in pizza dough are perishable, you can set up the dough as you get ready in the morning (which takes about 2 minutes) and set the delay timer so it will be ready when you get home.

I almost forgot to take a picture of my meatless "supreme" pizza!

Kielbasa Spaghetti

Uhoh... I chopped up the ingredients to make a stir fried turkey kielbasa tomato sauce spaghetti... only to find that I was almost out of sauce. Thankfully, I found a tiny, neglected can of tomato paste on the bottom shelf of the pantry.

I mixed a 6 oz can of tomato paste with half a cup of water and then bottled sauce to it. I add garlic and other spices while I'm cooking the meat, so I didn't add any additional spices to the sauce. Frequently I add frozen peas but for some reason that night I decided against it.

This was such a fast meal to cook, eat and clean up! Is it hard to wonder why I love stir frying?