EASY HOMEMADE GNOCCHI, with ANYTHING YOU LIKE

This is a recipe that once tried, you'll come back to over and over again.

1. It's SUPER EASY
2. It makes you feel like an Italian Domestic Goddess
3. It's SUPER CHEAP
4. It's versatile to the point you can pretty much stick anything you like over it. 
5. It's great to make with the kids. 

When Roo was weaning and we were very skint, I made a lot of gnocchi. That was about 9 years ago. We were mad for the stuff, and then I kind of just forgot about it. Well, in the interests of our budget saving, I returned to it last night - and honestly, I can't believe how easy it is and how silly I've been for not making it in several years. 

I had forgotten the simple joy of making dough, cutting it and then watching with child-like fascination as it pops to the top of the boiling water announcing to the world that it's cooked. 

I'm going to give you last night's recipe but at the end of it, I'm going to talk you through some fabulous alternatives. 

Last night I fried mine off in butter - because that is how I really love gnocchi, but very often you don't need to do the frying stage, especially if you're going to do sauce based bakes - more on that later. 

Gnocchi is so versatile, you can do a lot of
different things with it. Last night we had it
with wilted spinach and blue-cheese and
roast tomatoes. It was delicious with salad,
and very man-pleasing LOL. Jonathan
said it was his favourite dish of the week,
and there has been some stiff competition
this week. 

So many recipes and cooking books suggest that Quick and Easy is all people want. This has always frustrated me. There are some days that I actually want to take it SLOW and MINDFUL in the kitchen; when I'm not looking for a chuck it together kind of deal. I want dishes that I can chill out and cook with the kids whilst chattering about school, life and the universe. This is one of those dishes. 

It's a time to put on your pinny and the radio and lose yourself in the simple pleasures of turning basic ingredients into something special, just as if you were a magician. 

This dish will do ANY social occasion from after school children's dinners, to date night, to big family gatherings, to Sunday lunches. 

LEVEL: EASY

COST: £ (per portion, the gnocchi is about 40-50p a portion and then toppings vary) 

VEGETARIAN

TIME: About an 1 hour of lovely relaxing prep. 

INGREDIENTS  (Serves 6)

Basic Gnocchi recipe

1. 4-5 medium potatoes peeled, quartered and boiled until just soft. 
2. 90-100g of flour 
3. 1 egg

Pan Fried in Butter with wilted spinach, blue cheese and warm tomatoes. 

a couple of teaspoons of butter

1 bag of spinach or 2 large bunches from the market

1 palm size piece of blue cheese - gorgonzola or stilton or any other blue cheese

5-6 cherry tomatoes. 

METHOD. 

The dough should just hold
together like this. You'll
feel when it's right in
your hand. 

1. Rice or mash your boiled potatoes until they are fluffy and lump free (I always use a ricer) 
2. Scatter and fold in half the flour into the mashed potatoes 
3. Add the beaten egg and fold
4. Add the rest of the flour. and with your hands, begin to turn the dough over in the bowl. You want to keep the dough as soft as you can but so that it still holds together. You may need to had a small handful of extra flour if you're potatoes were a little bigger. 

NEXT 

They firm up whilst cooking
and go a little heavier and a
little slimy. 

1. Cut the dough into about 6 pieces and using your fingers on a floured board, make it into a small sausage / snake shape. Cutting it into small pieces a little wider than the width of a fork. 
2. In a large pan, bring water up to the boil and turn down to a gentle simmer. Plop your little soft dough balls into the hot water and watch as they sink to the bottom. After a minute or two, they will float to the surface and let you know they are ready. 



Cut them a little wider than
a fork and then press the
fork in - the idea is that
it will trap the sauce and
flavours, as well as making
it look pretty. 

3. Scoop from the surface and put on a plate. Repeat this process until you have used all your dough. 

NEXT - if you're not making a sauce-baked dish (see below for details) 

Fry until golden brown

1. In a frying pan, heat butter and oil until the butter starts to foam. Fry them off in batches (if you add too many, the residual water will make them sweat rather than fry golden brown.) Each batch takes a few minutes and they need a little care so as to keep them golden and not burned. 

2. In the same buttery pan, add your washed spinach and wilt it down. Spread out across the bottom of an oven proof dish and layer up the gnocchi around it, pulling out bits of spinach to make it look pretty. Add crumbled blue cheese and the tomatoes halved. 

3. Warm through in the oven for about 15 minutes. For the purposes of last night, I wanted to serve it with salad so didn't want it piping hot - just warmed, but leave it in for 20-25 if you want it really hot. 

TOP TIP: You can make these in big batches and then keep them in the fridge in a Tupperware box for 3-4 days, just heating them up when and as. 

OPTIONS & IDEAS

SPINACH AND PARMESAN

I split the gnocchi portions and fed the girls with the gnocchi, wilted spinach and parmesan - a drizzle of truffle oil is wonderful on top. 

BAKED TOMATO GNOCCHI

Stop at the boiling stage and place in a casserole dish / oven proof lasagne dish. Add pasta, basil leaves and mozzarella and bake for around 30-40 minutes. 

CREAMY CHICKEN GNOCCHI BAKE

Stop at the boiling stage and make a white cheddar cheese sauce. Add either fried or roasted chicken, asparagus or peas and / or blue cheese and pour over the gnocchi, baking for around 30-40 minutes 

PAN FRIED WITH HOT SMOKED SALMON & HORSERADISH CREAM

Pan fry the gnocchi, place on a warmed plate and flake over hot-smoked salmon or trout. 

3tbsp Mayonaise

1 tbsp Creme Fraiche

1 tsp (to taste) Horseradish

PAN FRIED WITH PRAWNS & SCANDI CREAM & DILL

Pan fry the gnocchi, place on a warmed plate. On the side place the Prawn and Scandi Cream & Dill mix

3tbsp of Mayonnaise

1 tbsp Creme Fraiche

About 2-3 tbsp of finely chopped dill

3 handfuls of small atlantic prawns. 

The options are endless and I look forward to reading some of your favourite combinations in the comments. 

Snuggly, Creamy, Warm Rice Pudding...

On a cold winter's day, when the ice
is on the cars and the night has come in
early, the perfect remedy for the January blues
is the rich, creamy, indulgent hug that
old fashioned rice pudding gives you. 

My children love Rice Pudding, which was my completely self-interested excuse to make homemade rice-pudding. 

My mum was a great cook but she never really liked puddings and so didn't often make them, which is a bit like me now. However, one of my resounding memories of my childhood is my mum's homemade rice-pudding. 

Simply, one day, after years of me loving and eating the tinned rice-pudding (hot or cold) my mum produced a casserole dish from the oven and presented me with homemade rice-pudding. Perhaps it was its completely unexpected arrival that added that extra note of sweetness, but ever since, Rice Pudding as been one of my favourite non-pudding-sort-of-girl puddings. 

Then whilst we were in Copenhagen over New Year's Eve, every tea room and eatery we went in had a very special rice pudding dish on the menu, which when I first ordered it, I hadn't realised was something very specific to Danish Christmases. Which is why, when on Jan 2nd when I went to order it, I was told in no uncertain terms that Rice Pudding was finished for the year! It seemed that it was as ridiculous as me asking for Christmas Pudding in July.  

Rice Pudding, the Danish
Christmas way. We had this
in a tea-room in Copenhagen.
Served cold with almonds and
 a cherry compote, it's a very
 special celebration dish. 

In Denmark, it's served over the Christmas period, cold, creamy and with almonds, topped with a rich cherry compote. Next year, on our Christmas Eve's Eve Book Gifting Night (another tradition we've adopted from our beloved Denmark) I shall be making it the Danish way. 

But for now, whilst it's gloomy, grey, icy and snowy, the only way I can think of Rice Pudding is hot from the oven, baked with the caramelised bits around the edge and the nutmeg turning the top a golden brown. 

It's not a necessarily cheap dish to make but it's worth making indulgently if you're going to do it. There's no room for skimping on calories here. 

This is a mash-up recipe from my mum, who she thinks used a Delia Smith recipe all those years ago -but to be honest, no one can really claim to own the Rice Pudding recipe; it's been a nursery pudding for as long as time itself. 

INGREDIENTS: 

1/4 a packet of pudding Rice

1 standard can of Evaporated milk

1 pint of milk

30g of golden caster sugar 

25g of butter

1/2 a nutmeg

METHOD

Heavily butter line a heavy based casserole dish

Pour in the rice 

the evaporated milk

the milk

the sugar

the butter

Give it a good stir with a wooden spoon and place in the oven on 180 for around 40 minutes. Remove it and give it a really good stir, loosening the rice from the bottom. 

Grate half a nutmeg over the top and return to the oven, turning it down to about 120 for a further 40-50 minutes.

Serve immediately. 

TOP TIP, if left or you put left overs in the fridge, it has a habit of going solid as the rice takes up more of the liquid. Don't panic, get another ovenproof pan, spoon in the solid mass and break down with a fork, add about a cupful of milk and return to the oven for 15-20 minutes and it will be all good again. 

Look At This Really Rubbish Photo...

As the title of this blog post suggests, it really is a rubbish photo and yet it is one of the proudest photos that I have taken, and the reason why is because it is the actuation of a resolution. It is the visible results of making a change that is important for our children's future.

Visible difference of the lifestyle choices
we are making as a family. We've got a
long way to go, but we've made a start and
the feeling of making a difference is powerful.

It was with a very heavy heart that we watched the BBC's Blue Planet with the gorgeous David Attenborough, and watched as the most incredible, noble, miraculous sea-life navigated our increasingly polluted oceans. We, all of us, have the power to do something about that in our own small way. 

There's a long way to go, there's no denying it but as a family, we hit our goal to only have ONE black bag of rubbish and to recycle all our other household gods. We SMASHED that target in our second week of trying. 

BREAKING DOWN PACKAGING.

We've always generally recycled, in as we've always had a full glass / plastic box and a full paper box, but being as this is an honest place, I was a lazy recycler - if it was easily one thing or another it would get put in the bag and if he was a sort of mash up of materials, it often, for the sake of what I thought was time saving, just got shoved in the main bin. 

NOT ANYMORE - nope, this just goes to show the impact of how taking that extra 1-30 seconds to tear apart packaging and separate the materials makes a massive accumulative difference.

This week we had three recycling boxes, a full food box from peelings, scraps and tea bags, and just one black bag of landfill. 

Our aim is to get down to just 1 black bag a fortnight - and being as there shouldn't be any smelly food items etc in the bin, that should work. 

MINDFUL SHOPPING. 

This result isn't just about better waste sorting, but of shopping more mindfully, of buying less packaging in the first place. By turning to a mostly meat-based diet and shopping at the green grocers,  using paper bags in that old skool way, the amount of potential rubbish being brought into the house has reduced significantly. 

Big and Small Revolutions. What a trip to the coffee shop taught us last night.

Last night, after drama-rama class, I took Betty to Cafe Nero as a treat for going up a level in her reading at school. It was freezing cold, her sister was at the later  drama session and we had an hour to kill.

Huddling round with our hot-chocolates we chatted about the day and suddenly, because I have all but killed our coffee-cake cafe habit (saving us nearly £200 a month), this 'naughty' rule-break felt really special.

It went to show how mindset is so adaptable and that the smallest changes can make the biggest difference. There have been many times I've sat in the coffee shop not really being present with the girls because it's all so much part of routine, but last night wasn't like that. I wasn't going to waste our precious treat checking my phone or glancing through the newspaper. No - heading out and spending £12 on a tea-time treat was suddenly seen in terms of being 25% of our weekly food bill challenge. It was special. It put it firmly in perspective.

What was also interesting was that as Betty didn't finish her chocolate cake, which was almost bigger than her head to be fair, we asked to take it away with us. The barista was very happy to pack it up and grabbed for a clear plastic box. I bravely asked if he would mind putting it in a paper bag and explained that we were trying to reduce our plastic as part of our New Year resolutions.

He broke into a wide grin and told me that I was just one of many people that day who had said something similar and that many people had started bringing their own cups.

So as Betty and I walked back to meet Rosie, hand in hand chatting away, swinging our paperbag of left-overs by our side, it made me feel that we are actually part of a vastly spreading movement between ordinary families like our own who are genuinely determined and committed to making as much change as we can - and I felt genuinely optimistic that things are changing.

Courgette, Chili Penne Pasta with Spinach Balls.

LEVEL: Medium
TIME: approx 20-30 minutes
VEGETARIAN
COST: £

This was tonight's dinner.

Antonio Carluccio was a great food hero of mine. He elevated simplicity into something divine; his food based on principles of flavour, freshness and balance.

For years as a family we have loved going to Carluccio's and eating the courgette and spinach ball pasta dish; a firm favourite regardless of age.

Over the years, the dish has been assimilated into our own family recipe book. It's a dish that will force even the most dedicated carnivore to admit that there are really enjoyable vegetarian dishes.

In order to kick start our move towards more vegetarian dishes, this was put on the menu plan as a way of reassuring the family that it was all going to be alright LOL

INGREDIENTS: (For 4)

Good Quality dried pasta shells
1 large courgette
Half a red chilli
1 clove of garlic
olive oil

FOR THE SPINACH BALLS:

5-6 Frozen spinach balls
parmesan cheese
1 Egg
1 cup of white bread crumbs

This is my Tefl electric grater (several
different grating wheels for different jobs). It's
 fab
for making up 'posh' salads, and for jobs
like this. It's a really handy piece of
kitchen equipment. 

• Defrost the spinach balls by placing in a frying pan and stirring until all the moisture has gone and put aside.
• In a mixing bowl put a cup of breadcrumbs, a cup of grated parmesan, and one beaten egg. Add the spinach and mix well. 
• Place the pasta on to boil for about 10-13 minutes depending on preference. 
• Grate the courgette and fry in a pan with chilli and garlic and a generous slug of olive oil. 
• Form the spinach balls into balls about the size of a small ping-pong ball and shallow fry them in a frying pan, turning regularly until they turn a golden brown where the cheese and bread are. Place on baking tray and keep warm in the oven. 
• Drain the pasta, toss in the courgette mixture, plate up and place three spinach balls on top, sprinkle generously with parmesan cheese.