A little while ago, we participated in one of those really naff email pyramid schemes. You know the ones, where you send a recipe to someone, forward the email to 20 people, add your email address to a list at the bottom, and wait for the flood of amazing recipes to appear in your inbox. 36, according to the email, although we worked out that if everyone actually participated, you would get 4000. Fortunately, not everyone actually participates.
However, with two of us participating, we did get a pretty decent haul. I don't know if we ever really intended to make them, but we felt so guilty for subjecting people whose respect we covet to a pyramid scheme that we thought we'd better at least try them all. And then we thought, why not blog about them. So here we are. We're also quite enamoured of our bicycles (Pedro and Felicity) at the moment, so expect them to make cameos from time to time.
Not doing things by halves, we opted not only to start with a challenge (home-made gnocchi), but also to feed it to guests. Sorry guys. They were very sporting.
Here's the recipe:
Sweet Potato Gnocchi in Tomato Sauce
Ingredients
250g sweet potato
350g potato, peeled, cut into chunks
1 egg yolk
60g grated parmesan cheese
1 cup plain white flour
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
300g tinned chopped tomatoes
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1/2 cup fresh basil
Instructions
Preheat oven to 200 degrees C (how do you make the little degree sign?). Place the sweet potato on a baking tray. Cook for 40 minutes or until soft.
Meanwhile, cook potato in boiling salted water for 20 minutes, or until tender. Drain and return to pan. Place over a very low heat for 2 minutes, or until dry.
Squeeze out flesh of sweet potato from skins and add to potato. Mash well. Add egg yolk, 30g parmesan and three-quarters of the flour. Add nutmeg and season to taste with salt and freshly ground black pepper.
Scatter half of the remaining flour over a work surface. Shape the gnocchi mixture into a log. Cut into bite-sized pieces - dip the knife into remaining flour so mixture doesn't stick to the knife as you cut. If desired, roll each piece into the back of a fork to make a ridged pattern. Bring a large saucepan of water to the boil, Add the gnocchi in batches. As they rise to the surface, remove with a slotted spoon and set aside.
Meanwhile, place tomatoes and garlic in a saucepan over medium-low heat and simmer for 10 minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper. And gnocchi. Simmer over low heat for a further 10 minutes. Top with basil leaves and extra parmesan cheese and serve.
This wasn't the quickest or easiest recipe to start with, but it was pretty fun. We weren't sure how many people it would serve, and, feeding 5, we decided to double it, but this turned out to be unnecessary as there was loads of dough left over. It was good to have slightly more tomato sauce though. Squeezing the sweet potato flesh out of their skins was fun, though it seemed a shame not to eat it then and there, as the taste of sweet potato wasn't super-strong in the finished product. I think it was mainly in there for colour. It would be fun to try this with kumara at home rather than the orange sweet potato which is all you can get in the UK.
It was really hard to know how much flour to add to the dough to get it to the right consistency. It was very sticky, so flour all over everything - bench, hands, utensils - is essential. I suspect our concern about the stickiness of the dough led us to add too much flour to the mixture itself, as some of the finished gnocchi were quite gloopy in the mouth, but it's hard to know without making it several times and experimenting to get the ratios exactly right. In the end, the gnocchi were probably a bit too large and a bit too soft, but our tolerant guests were very polite. The boys polished it all off, so it can't have been too bad.
The sauce was incredibly basic, but made with good quality tinned tomatoes it was deceptively good, especially with fresh basil and parmesan liberally applied. The gnocchi are pretty heavy, so this doesn't need to be served with anything except a fresh green salad. We made one of spinach, cress, and rocket with tomato, red pepper, and spring onions.
So there you have it, our first effort. More anon, as my nana signs off her letters.
Our first anonymous reader made a suggestion about the gnocchi, but didn't want to post it cause he's too shy. But I endorse it! Salt and olive oil in the water, people, salt and olive oil.
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