Coconut & Vanilla

Beetroot Gnocchi

slightly adapted from the recipe from Chili & Ciabatta

yields: about 160 gnocchi (serves 4 as a main course with a corresponding sauce or some vegetables)

Ingredients:

• 2 middle-sized beetroots (raw) or 200 g cooked/roasted beetroot (skin removed)
• 500 g ricotta
• 1 egg
• 75 g parmesan, finely grated
• 1 1/4 tsp salt
• pepper
• 140 g flour for the batter
• 75 g flour for tossing the gnocchi

If you use raw beetroots, wrap them in aluminium foil and roast them for 1 hour at 200° C in the oven. Let the beetroots cool. The skin can now easily be removed with a small knife (if you don’t want to get red handed, wear disposable gloves).

Finely grate about 200 g of the beetroots. Mix with the ricotta, egg, parmesan, salt and pepper. Fold in the flour. (The batter can be prepared to this step and stored in the fridge over night.)

For the whole amount of gnocchi I used 3 baking sheets to set them aside. I cooked half of the recipe (for 2 persons) and froze the other half.

Line the sheets with parchment paper.

Place the rest of the flour in a deep dish. You see the following way of proceeding very good in my video above. Make small dumplings using two teaspoons. Place the dumplings in the flour dish. Toss the dumplings in the flour, then cast it off again (I tossed them cautiously between my hands). Shape the dumpling into small cylinders. Roll them over a gnocchi board. If you don’t own one, roll them over the prongs of a fork or just impress them with a fork. Place the gnocchi onto the baking sheets. (Shaped gnocchi can be prepared 6 hours in advance, just cool them in the fridge.)

Bring a large pot of water to the boil. Add salt. If you make the beans, blanch them first.

Add the gnocchi to the boiling water, reduce the heat, so it just simmers. When they are rising to the surface, leave them in the water for about another minute. Remove with a slotted spoon and arrange them on plates.

Serve with the beans and the brown nut butter (or some other sauce).

Green Beans in a twofold brown nut butter

yields: 2 servings

(the quantities are approximations, since I didn’t measure them)

Ingredients:

• 2 handfuls of green beans, washed and trimmed
• 30 g slivered almonds (if you have, substitute half of them with  slivered hazelnuts)
• 80 g butter

Cut the green beans in halves or thirds, depending on their size. Blanch them in boiling salt water for about 5 minutes (I used the same water as for the gnocchi). Remove them with a slotted spoon to a colander and rinse them shortly under cold water.

I started with the following step after I put the gnocchi into boiling salted water:

Roast the slivered almonds in a large frying pan. When they start to smell and to take colour, add the butter and melt it. The butter turns quickly into brown butter and the nuts are also roasting quickly. Be cautious, so nothing burns! I removed the pan from the heat, since its own heat was enough. Add the beans to the butter and glaze them. Serve with the gnocchi.

The beans with the brown nut butter work also very well as a side dish or with other pasta or polenta as a vegetarian main meal.