Gnocchi, delicious stodgy gnocchi. I haven’t eaten gnocchi in well over a year and truly missed it. When I saw this
recipe in the Lean In 15 book I had to leap at it! How could I not?!
This recipe had very few recipes, followed the 15 minute motto and is freezeable! This worked out great as when the mister walked in the door he declared he wanted a takeaway to start off our holiday. Hello, flab abs. Thankfully because its a freezable recipe, I can slap it in the freezer for when we get back and need to hop back on track. Now, back to the recipe. I’ve never made ragu before. Sure, I make my own sauce for pasta using chopped tomatos but it never contains meat. This also intrigued me and pulled me towards the recipe.
The recipe calls for the following ingredients:
1 tbsp olive oil
1 red onion, diced
1 clove of garlic, chopped
1 sprig of rosemary
6 sausages
1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
1 tin chopped tomatoes
300g fresh gnocchi
1/2 bunch of basil, roughly chopped
Okay so you know me by now, I didn’t follow the ingredient list fully. I don’t like rosemary, so I opted out of that and substituted with italian seasoning. I also used garlic granules rather than chopping a clove of garlic because frankly, I don’t want garlic fingers for my holiday. As I stated before, I’m not a big fan of oil so I substituted with frylight. Lastly, I couldn’t find any basil at the store when I went shopping. Hey ho – on with the cooking!
This was such a simple recipe, but there is one hang up for me. Raw sausage. I hate, hate, hate handling raw meat. Having to squeeze sausage meat out of its skin casing was nearly too much to me. Commence gagging and heaving. I did it though
and even had a celebratory dance in the kitchen afterward. Other than that gruesome prep, everything else was easy peasy.
I like the fact that the recipe calls for red onion. I think red onion is overlooked in cooking, probably because its seen as a “sweet eating” onion. I find when its cooked it adds a different depth of flavour. The smell when it was frying was amazing as well, not as strong as white onion. Now, the recipe states to fry the onions with garlic and rosemary. As I didn’t have either of these things, I fried them on their own. I didn’t add any seasonings until I added the little sausage balls to the pan. Ha, sausage balls.
The mister got a bit worried when I added the balsamic vinegar. I tried to reassure him that it isn’t like white vinegar. He just grumbled and walked out of the kitchen. After the balsamic vinegar cooked off I added in the tinned tomatoes. Ah, familiar ground. I let this simmer while the gnocchi boiled away. That’s it, I had nothing else to do. The recipe is THAT simple.
As I said above, we didn’t actually eat this tonight. It’s tucked away snuggly in the freezer for when we return from holiday. I did, however, have a bite of it to see how it tastes. The ragu is sweet and meaty. I’m not sure if the sausage balls were supposed to stay intact, but most of mine came apart. Probably because I used low-fat sausages, either way though it made a lovely texture with chunks of sausages and little bits.
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