Thursday, September 1, 2011

Pan Fried Gnocchi with Grilled Eggplant


Over the weekend I had made some chicken cutlets and mashed potatoes and had quite a bit of leftover mashed potatoes. I'm not a huge potato person so I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with all the leftovers, I browsed through some recipes contemplating making a potato bread of some sort when I had an idea...gnocchi.

 Gnocchi is actually pretty easy to make and if you happen to have mashed potatoes lying around they can be made in a cinch. Trust me when I say it's a beautiful thing if you can skip over the boiling potatoes part. I have watched my grandmother make gnocchi thousands of times but had never attempted to do them solo. I decided to just go ahead and try it out, adding a little of this and a little of that until I had achieved what I thought was a good dough. I decided to fry them in a pan with a little butter after boiling them and serve them with some grilled eggplant. It was a surprisingly light dinner and was absolutely delicious.


Gnocchi
Yield: About 1 lb of gnocchi
Prep Time; 40 minutes     I     Cook Time: 15 minutes

Ingredients

  • 2 cups leftover mashed potatoes
  • 1 egg
  • 1 cup flour
  • 3 tablespoons grated cheese
  • 1 tsp salt
Combine all of the ingredients in a stand mixer adding the flour in slowly. You may need to add more flour, it all depends on how loose your mashed potatoes are. The flour dough should be thick and form a ball, almost like a pizza dough looks. Remove the dough from the stand mixer and place on a floured counter.

To form the gnocchi cut a piece of dough and roll it out into a long line. Using a knife or a pizza cutter, cut out 1 inch pieces of pasta.

Continue this process until you have formed all of the gnocchi. 


After you have formed all of the gnocchi, use a fork and press the tines into the dough to made the lines you typically see in gnocchi. You can opt to skip this part and boil the pasta as is, but I like the way it looks like with the lines. 

Cook the pasta in boiling salted water for approximately 6 minutes or until the pasta begins to float. 


In the meantime I sliced up some eggplant really thin and grilled them on a griddle pan. I also heated up a little bit of butter in a frying pan and gave a quick fry to the cooked pasta and served them up together because to me there's nothing better than some grilled eggplant over pasta. 


4 comments:

Unknown said...

I think I'd enjoy the gnocchi pan-friend after the boiling. I've only made them once and didn't like the slimy feel in my mouth. The crispiness in your picture looks so appealing. Many thanks for the recipe and the idea. You found a fantastic way to use the leftovers!

Laura @ Sprint 2 the Table said...

I only recently heard about pan-friend gnocchi. Such a great (easier) way to get it right! Have you ever tried a squash-based gnocchi? I love a good butternut version.

Unknown said...

@ Laura...

I have made a pumpkin gnocchi with a brown butter sauce, it's essentially the same recipe just supplementing the pumpkin for the potatoes. It's delicious too!

Erin said...

I like the idea of pan frying the gnocchi, such a great flavor that would add!