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Gluten Free Pumpkin Gnocchi

November 22, 2019 by lisahearts Leave a Comment

Gluten Free Pumpkin Gnocchi
Gluten Free Pumpkin Gnocchi
2/3 cup pumpkin puree (fresh or canned)
1/2 cup ricotta
1 1/4 cup Bob’s Red Mill 1-1 Gluten Free Flour
1/3 cup shredded parmesan
1 egg
1/2 tsp kosher salt

Brown Butter with Sage
1 tsp oil
3 1/3 tbsp butter
20-25 leaves of fresh sage

Measure 2/3 cup of pumpkin puree and place in cheesecloth. Squeeze out liquid until about 1/3 cup of puree remains. Add to your stand mixer along with ricotta and egg. Mix. Mixture will look grainy.

Next, add the flour, parmesan, and salt, and mix until everything comes together in a soft dough.

Tip dough out on to a lightly floured surface and slightly knead until it is smooth and all you can’t see any more clumps of ricotta. Divide into 8 equal pieces.

Roll out each piece into a long snake until it is roughly the circumference of a dime. Slice into 1/2″ bits and press lightly with a fork on the freshly cut edge to create a ridged pattern. Do this with the remaining dough until everything has been cut and patterned.

Bring a large pot of water to the boil and season with salt. Add gnocchi all at once into the pot and allow to cook until dough floats to the top. Stir gently once or twice at the start to make sure nothing is sticking to each other or the pot to prevent them from floating. Once they have come to the top, scoop out with a slotted spoon and place on a paper towel and/or sieve to drain. Cooking should take only 1-2 minutes.

Heat oil and butter in a large pan until butter is completely melted. Bubbles should disappear and butter will begin to turn brown and smell nutty. Add in gnocchi and sage leaves.

Cook in two or three batches to prevent overcrowding if necessary.

Toss gnocchi occasionally to get both sides cooked. Once they crisp up on the outside and turn golden brown, they’re cooked and ready to be plated. Top with shredded parmesan and season with salt and pepper.

What’s everyone been up to this Fall? Eating well, I hope. There’s still time to whip up some pumpkin goodness this season, and I think today is a great day to do it. There are leaves on the ground (so many leaves…) and it’s just chilly and rainy enough outside to have an excuse to stay in and snuggle. This gnocchi is a perfect earthy comfort food to put on the table tonight, so let me show you how.

I felt very weird not starting the instructions for this recipe with “Preheat the oven”. While savory foods aren’t my typical go-to, I could still tackle this one with a fair amount of skill since I still got to mix flour and eggs in my kitchenaid.

The first time I saw gnocchi was on Masterchef Australia, and they called the dough “pillows”. How can you not want to eat something with such a cute nickname? But, I didn’t expect I’d ever get the chance. It’s a pasta, and as you know, wheat and I are not friends. I’m comfortable enough to make desserts gluten free, but pasta felt a little out of my skill set. You know what though? I tried it. And the very first time I made it, it was amazing! I really thought these would be dense and tasteless and pretty much just a mess. I was so thrilled when the butter bubbled and turned nutty and the gnocchi went from soft to crisp and golden.

Ideally, you’ll have some cheesecloth laying around. Not a big deal if you don’t though. The idea is that you want to dry out some of the pumpkin puree so it isn’t so wet and soupy. With a cheesecloth, you can scoop the puree into the middle and squeeze out the liquid. You can accomplish the same thing with a couple paper towels, but you have to be much more gentle when squeezing so the paper towel doesn’t rip. Or, you can lay some paper towels out on a sieve and let the pumpkin sit in there for a bit and drip dry (hahaha oh man).

There isn’t an exact measurement of liquid I can tell you needs to come out, and that would be annoying to try to reach anyway, right? So you just have to eyeball it. You want the puree to be pretty tacky after some of the liquid is removed. In my testing, I always get about 1/3 cup puree left over.

You can toss out out the pumpkin juice (gross) and move the dried out puree to your mixing bowl. Add in the ricotta and egg and let it mix for a minute so it comes together. The ricotta won’t completely mix in, but that’s fine. We’re going to knead it in later. Right now it’s…really gross looking. Lumpy and smells like spaghetti-o’s.

Add in the flour, parmesan, and salt, and mix again. This time, the mixture will come together into a soft dough. Are there still ricotta lumps? Don’t worry, we’re getting to it.

Very lightly flour a large surface so we can begin shaping the dough into PILLOWS. When I say very lightly, I mean it. This dough needs to retain a bit of tackiness so it can grip the surface a little to be rolled out smoothly. Too much flour and it will just slide around. Want to know how I know? You know.

So, tip out the dough onto your floured surface and roll it up into a ball. By shaping it like this, you should be able to knock around whatever ricotta lumps were still poking through. If you can still spot some, just play with the dough a bit more and it should eventually come out smooth.

Divide up the dough into roughly 8 equal parts. Doing so will just make each piece easier to roll out into a long snake-like piece. I kind of just rolled until it felt right. If you have a dime handy, your snake should have about the same circumference as the dime (or 18mm in diameter for you nerds).

Now you want to slice the snake into equal pillows. I cut mine into about a 1/2 inch each. I was having trouble just doing it by eye, and since I apparently don’t own a ruler, I took a sheet of college-ruled paper and cut the length of two lines of space. There must be a name for this kind of ingenuity. Or is it just called being lazy…?

Once you have everything sliced, you can begin making the ridge pattern. While this is optional, the ridged like to hold things like yummy brown butter, and they look nice, so I recommend it. Holding your fork so the tines are flat against the dough, gently press down into the fresh cut edge of your gnocchi. This will squash the rectangle into more of a round shape. If the dough sticks to your fork, gently roll the dough off rather than trying to pull it off straight.

Have all of your gnocchi gathered together because when we go to put them in the pot, you want to try to get them all in at once. If you’re tossing in a handful at a time, they’re going to cook at different rates and you might get some under and overcooked gnocchi sneaking onto your plate.

Start a boil in a large pot and season the water with salt. When it has reach the boil, pour all of the gnocchi in and give them a gently stir so they don’t stick. It should only take a minute or two for them to cook. You’ll know they’re done when they float to the top of the water. Take a slated spoon and skim off whatever has come to the top and place them in a sieve lined with paper towels so they can drain off. Once they’re all out and drained, it’s time for the final cooking procedure.

Heat your oil and butter in a saucepan on the stove. The butter will first melt, then bubble, then it will become suspiciously still. When it settles down like this, it will start the browning process. Keep and eye on it and give it a stir here and there to keep it from burning. Once it has turned brown and you can smell a fragrant nuttiness, add in the gnocchi and sage. Please do not overcrowd the pan! I kept trying to cook them all at once, but it takes forever and they won’t cook evenly, so just do the cooking in a couple batches if you need to and give those poor little guys some room.

Stir and toss them around as they cook so they become completely coated in butter and both sides of the gnocchi get crispy and golden brown. This can take between 5-15 minutes depending on your heat and how full the pan is. Remember, you already boiled them, so you aren’t having to cook them all the way through. This is just to get them flavorful and crispy.

Don’t forget to season these once they’re done. I only keep unsalted butter in my house because I mainly use it for baking, so be sure to salt your gnocchi before serving if your butter is unsalted!

These little pillows are so addicting. I couldn’t stop myself from snacking on them while I was trying to shoot them! It was really dangerous. I seriously had to skip dinner a couple times because I had already eaten a full serving of these. Good luck my friend.

Filed Under: food photography, gluten free, recipes, savory Tagged With: butter, dinner, earthy, fall, gluten free, pasta, pumpkin, sage, seasonal

Blood, Glass, and Savory Pies

June 20, 2015 by lisahearts Leave a Comment

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I don’t think I’m knowledgable enough to make a grand statement about life. I can’t say, “Life is a series of cycles!” because I don’t know that for sure. I’ve been prancing around this world for 26 years now, but I feel like I’ve only just started to get a grasp on what I’m doing in the past year or two. I’m learning how to interact with people and how your actions impact those around you. I always kind of knew that, but it takes time to really see it happening sometimes. I think living with someone teaches you a lot about love and how difficult it can be.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is I’m going through one of those things in life that has a word, but I don’t know what that word is. Phase? Transition? I think it’s transition. Basically, things are about to change. Bill is nearly done with his dissertation (I don’t think that’s how he would put it – there’s still so much work to be done). Completing his Ph.D means he moves on to another chapter. One that he hasn’t seen and doesn’t know what it will be about. It’s a new chapter for both of us. But even before that, he’s taking on some teaching in the upcoming semester. He will be teaching AND writing and completing his dissertation. Sounds super scary and hard! But he is so good at this. He can absolutely do it and do it well. I just need to do my part to help him and make sure he eats and sleeps. So, we’re embarking on a new journey already. Once he starts the semester I’m going to start spending more time at home to do tasks he doesn’t have the time for anymore. Cooking mostly. Which means I need to learn how to cook! We unfortunately can’t eat cake for dinner every night (or can we…?). We’re excited. I’m VERY excited to have more time to do housework and photography work. Despite being a bit of a messy person, I’m actually somewhat organized. I love a clean and organized house. We keep up with housework as much as we can on the weekends and after work, but it’ll be nice to have an entire day to just CLEAN. Don’t tell anyone, but I’d be super happy to be a housewife.

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I learned one of those lessons the other day that makes you think, “Huh, I must not be an adult yet”. One of those things I probably should have known, my mom would have known, but I don’t often use my energy to think to hard. I don’t go stomping around, guns blazing, jumping into whatever sounds fine at the time. I do think ahead, and I think I’m pretty intelligent about my choices. But, I trust my intuition a lot of the time. I’m alright with reading people and situations, especially when it comes to feelings, so sometimes, I just DO stuff without wondering if it will turn into mush.

And they did. When you freeze fresh raspberries and then thaw them, they are just a mushy mess. I had seen them thaw and melt and morph into this sad blob, and yet, I just chucked them back into the fridge when I was done with them (I have a lot of hobbies – cleaning up after a project is not one of them).

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Well, the next day after work, I had just started the dough for my handpie dinner experiment when my husband opened the fridge and found sticky red juice all over our produce. Oops. Not one of the best (or worst) things I’ve done. He quietly removed all the food and the drawers and shelf and began a good wipe down. He’s precious. I felt loads of guilt, but he never blamed me for doing something dumb that resulted in him having to use his free time to clean up my mess. No, he wasn’t happy, but he didn’t direct any of his unhappiness towards his slightly harebrained wife.

And it’s a real good thing he didn’t feel any animosity towards me, because that was just the beginning of the next two hours of clean up. While trying to clean up the bottom shelf, the glass sheet exploded and shattered into a firework of a million pieces. On the floor, on the counter, in the sink and the disposal… There was red everywhere from raspberries and blood from my husband’s hands.

I don’t deal very well with this kind of tension. I just kind of stand around in silence hoping someone will laugh so I know it’s not a disaster.

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I made sure he took a moment to relax and clean up his cuts before he jumped back in to clean up the explosion. There wasn’t much I could do otherwise. I cleaned up some of the glass, but our kitchen isn’t very big and I would have gotten in the way. So I mostly continued making handpies. Is that what a wife is supposed to do?

Well, after cleaning the juice and blood, the counter and floor, the sink, disposal, toaster, and vacuum, the handpies were out of the oven and on my set for shooting. I left a couple on the tray in the kitchen and let him know I wouldn’t be needing them so to feel free to munch. I’m not a very experienced cook. Although I do a lot of baking, I’m not so familiar with the stove top. The hand pies were a nice transition into the savory world since it involves pastry so much of the process was done in the oven.

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When I went back to the kitchen after shooting, the handpies I had left were nearly all gone! And my poor husband that had just spent all evening dealing with explosions and injuries and messes was so happy to have eaten them (and was patiently waiting for me to finish shooting so he could eat the rest).

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He said, “You’re going to be making more of those pies” and excitedly began listing off complimentary meats and sauces and cheeses that would all work well in a handpie. Since savory foods aren’t my forte, combinations of foods does not come naturally to me. I’ll need his help mixing ingredients together to produce a cohesive flavor. But, something tells me he won’t mind at all.

This new food adventure is a little daunting. But seeing how good food can make my husband so happy, despite the circumstances, makes me eager to continue with my experiments.

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Filed Under: food photography, savory Tagged With: berries, dinner, pie, savory

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I am a photographer living in Pittsburgh with my cute husband and my salty cat. Although I primarily advertise shooting weddings and food, I do a little bit of everything. I love people, stories, feelings, and donuts.

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lisaxhearts

Pittsburgh based photographer and food blogger

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The link to this recipe is in my profile! Go get!

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I'm also pretty stoked to have caught a blep on film.

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