Girls Night In

I was super excited about this evening because I was trying out two Ella recipes (the excellent choices of housemate K): Gnocchi with Pea Pesto and Sweet Potato Brownies. We get to feel naughty because it seems like pasta and chocolate, but actually it's incredibly healthy! And naturally we can therefore indulge in some wine without feeling bad.

It's also lovely having new people over for dinner - feels like I've spent a lot of time working recently and maybe not enough doing fun things.

Mixed feelings about the success of these! The gnocchi was easy to assemble but had a texture that was both sticky and crumbly so it was quite hard to form into bits - also couldn't get the full amount of flour into the mix. Luckily I had Bonnie's nimble fingers to help but she is an expert dumpling-maker so she has skills. During cooking these did disintegrate a bit so I was left with a very sticky panful of gnocchi which were hard to stir into the pesto without them breaking up more.

Loved the flavour of the pesto - it's fresh and delicious but quite thick so I think needs more oil and water to make it an easier consistency to stir into the gnocchi. I think you can see what I mean from the photo.

I've changed the quantities here a bit to reflect my changes and I'll probably keep tweaking.

Pesto:
200g frozen peas
60g fresh basil
120g brazil nuts
12 tbsp olive oil
2 rounded tsp nutritional yeast
4-8 tbsp water as needed
1 bag pea shoots

Gnocchi:
1 kg mashing potatoes
4 tbsp apple puree
400g brown rice flour
salt & pepper

Pesto:
1. Put peas in a small pan and cover with cold water. Bring to the boil then drain.
2. Put 3/4 into the food processor with the basil, nuts, nutritional yeast , oil and 4 tsbp of the water.
3. Blend until smooth and creamy and add more water as needed to get a good consistency that isn't too thick.

Gnocchi:
1. Put potatoes (whole, don't chop) into a large pan and cover with cold water. Bring to the boil and cook for 20 minutes or until soft.
2. Drain and allow to cool then peel off their skins.
3. Mash with apple puree until smooth - this takes quite a while.
4. Season and stir in flour until a dough forms.
5. Flour the table or worksurface then roll the gnocchi into long sausage shapes (again this takes a while and you need to do it gradually).
6. Cut into 2cm pieces and press each one slightly with a fork to flatten.
7. Fill large saucepan with boiling water, add salt, and drop the gnocchi in.
8. Do NOT leave these: if they overcook they get sticky. They only take a couple of minutes to cook and you'll know when they're done because they float to the top.
9. Drain then put back in the pan with the pesto and remaining peas, and heat together for a couple of minutes.
10. Serve with some pea shoots to garnish.

No idea how it keeps but imagine it would reheat well if you added a bit more water to loosen the pesto.

As for the brownies - probably the less said the better. My expectations were high after Ella's claim about how 'divine' they are.

They're easy to make and the mixture tasted okay although not that chocolatey. They took FOREVER to cook and even then I couldn't get to grips with the strange consistency. The taste is like coco pops and strangely bready: Jenna re-named them 'brown-breadies'.

Not yummy (in fact quite unpleasant) and I don't want to eat them again. Ever. But I probably will have another go and tweak the recipe a bit - but until I've made something edible won't be sharing the recipe.

Bonnie liked everything but her reasoning:"I like mashed food"  was worrying. The following exchange between Jenna and Kim (who is kind about everything) sums it up:

K: Its' clever really, they don't have the taste of sweet potato at all.
J: Noooo, but they do have the consistency of sweet potato.

Yes. And personally that is not what I look for in a brownie.