Dear ana,
Poor neglected epistolary blog indeed!
I’ve been a pretty terrible correspondent because I’ve been a pretty terrible homemaker for most of this year. Being in a months-long funk is not very conducive to creativity, so I’m sad to say I’ve been eating pasta with sauce out of a jar for most of my dinners and falling into bed with the internet instead of knitting.
But, this story has a happy ending!
I’ve moved into a bigger house (with, as you already know, our mutual friend Alex), and it has resulted in a flurry of domestic activities. It’s amazing how much more motivated to do stuff I am when I’m in a bigger house (natural light! dishwasher! KITCHEN!) and around someone else who is also enthused about cooking, gardening and crafting.
So I’ve been baking and frying and stewing and knitting and gardening and decorating quite intensely for the past month or so. Hopefully this means I can post here more frequently.
As I’m typing this I’m sitting at our kitchen table, and opposite me Alex is measuring out the yogurt culture she received in the mail today so we can make our own yogurt. I have a lemon slice setting in the fridge, and cooked dinner for everyone tonight while looking out the kitchen window at Alex and my other housemate, Lisa, mow the lawn and plant our new vegetables (four varieties of tomatoes, capsicums, various herbs).
For dinner I cooked this ‘mediterranean’ gnocchi dish. Melbourne in particular is a city with a big Italian migrant population (WWII era, I believe), and their evolved influence informs a lot of our standard food (pizza, pasta, and ‘antipasto’ are fairly typical fare). This dish in particular I kind of improvised based on a dish I ate in a fairly upmarket (though very hip!) Italian restaurant near my friend Jackie’s place on the other side of town. I loved the dish so much when I ate it that I immediately had Jackie (who is a fabulous foodie herself) tell me just how I might prepare it. Here’s what I wound up with:
Fried Gnocchi with Mediterranean ‘Vegetables’
Ingredients
- Basic potato gnocchi – You can buy plastic-wrapped packets of them off the shelf (non-refrigerated!) in the supermarket here
- Olive oil – LOTS
- ALL THE GARLIC IN THE WORLD
- About half a small onion
- Salt
- Antipasto vegetables – black olives, roasted red pepper, marinated artichokes, marinated eggplant – anything will do
- Proscuitto if you’re a meat eater
- A fresh, ripe tomato
- Fresh parsley
- Parmesan cheese
In terms of quantities, remember that gnocchi is very filling. So measure out how much gnocchi you want to eat, and then measure out your antipasto to be about equal quantity to the gnocchi in total.
Method
So, you can roast or fry the garlic. I kind of decided to do this at the last minute, so I fried the garlic, but putting whole cloves of roast garlic in is a freaking awesome path to go down, I must say. But I fried, so:
- Fry your garlic (minced) and onion (diced finely) in a cast iron pan with lots of olive oil and salt. Do it over a medium-low heat and do it for a long-ish time – you want it to caramelise. If you’re eating meat, toss the shredded proscuitto in towards the end of this process to crisp it up a bit. When the garlic/onion is about right (give it a taste!) take it out of the pan. If the pan is all cruddy now, rinse/wipe it out.
- Now it’s time to fry the gnocchi. Fried gnocchi is pretty much the best thing in the entire universe. While boiled gnocchi ranges from doughy to gooey, fried gnocchi goes chewy and soft and caramelised – basically like the most perfect roasted garlic. It’s amazing. So: Your pan should be about medium heat. You need more olive oil. Put your gnocchi in the pan, all spread out evenly. Leave it to cook for about four-five minutes, until it’s slightly grilled (kinda golden) a bit on one side. Then you can toss it around to cook more evenly. Having one side crispy gives a nice bit more texture. Test it by biting into a bit every so often (you should be able to feel with your stirring when it’s getting softer). When it’s just about done (about 8 minutes)…
- Add all your pickled antipasto vegetables. Don’t even chop most of them them up – just make sure they’re relatively well drained. Whole olives, whole strips of pepper/capsicum, quarters/sixths of pickled artichoke hearts. Add back the garlic and onion (and proscuitto). Mix it all in. You want to make sure the antipasto stuff is hot enough but not cooked any more.
- Once everything is heated through, turn off the heat and add a diced tomato and a generous handful of chopped parsley, mix that through too. (Room temperature tomatoes are best!!) Again, you definitely don’t want to cook the tomato, just stir it through.
- Serve with parmesan cheese.
It is SO DELICIOUS. The caramelly garlic and olive oil goes perfect with the texture of the gnocchi, and the various flavours with the antipasto is a perfect complement. Having everything the same bite-size makes for a great balance of flavours when you’re eating, too. Usually when I make pasta I make a tomato-based sauce that I throw things into, but I absolutely love this method of just tossing big chunks of things in with the chunks of gnocchi without glueing it all together with any sauce. And it is so damn easy, and antipasto vegetables can hang around the fridge (and/or cupboard) for months and months.
Alex wanted to write up a food blog post of her own about it (in fact, now she’s finished with the yogurt cultures and is typing away madly on the other side of the table), so I think that counts as a success. Will no doubt be making this again! And next time I must remember to take a photo, too.
I look forward to reading more about your food and knitting adventures soon, too! I hear that you’ve been doing some natural yarn dyeing again? Do tell.
<3 <3 <3
Emily
