For today’s advent calendar fun, a recipe.

This has been adapted from Gennaro’s ‘Italian Year’ and a Jamie Oliver recipe called ‘Proper Bloke fusilli’ or suchlike.

Serves 2 – 3

Gnocchi:

250g potatoes, mashed and boiled
125g chestnut flour*
25g plain flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 egg
50g rice-flour** (for rolling out…)

Sausage sauce:

1 heaped tsp fennel seeds
2 finely chopped sundried tomatoes
handful of chestnut mushrooms
300g weightwatchers apple and pork sausages
1/2 wineglass dry white wine
zest and juice 1/2 a lemon
handful of fresh thyme leaves
1/2 tbsp dried oregano
one clove of garlic
handful of dried cranberries
1tsp olive oil

To make gnocchi; in a bowl, mix mashed potato, chestnut flour, plain flour, sat and egg. Mix well to form a dough, add more plain flour if needed. Sprinkle your rolling out surface with rice-flour then roll the dough into long sausages and cut into small pieces. I press the top of my small pieces with a fork to make a gnocchi-like impression. Once all the dough has been turned into little gnocchi pieces, transfer them to the fridge in a bowl, making sure everything is lightly dusted with rice-flour to prevent sticking.

While the gnocchi is cooling in the fridge, prepare your ingredients for the sausage sauce. First of all, remove the sausage meat from the sausages. This is quite easy – if messy – to achieve. I put all my sausage meat in a bowl. I then crush and finely chop a clove of garlic and scatter this over the sausage meat. You need to then zest and juice our lemon; zest it patchily and then juice only one half, as you only need half a lemon for this quantity. Crush your fennel seeds in a good pestle and mortar and set aside. Cut your mushrooms and sundried tomatoes, and strip the fresh thyme leaves from the woody stems.

Now everything is ready.

Put 1tsp olive oil in a pan and heat gently. Put the sausage meat and garlic in and stir around in the hot oil until brown on all sides. Add a little white wine if it begins to dry. When everything is nicely browned, add remaining white wine, lemon juice and zest, thyme leaves, dried oregano, tomatoes, mushrooms, cranberries and fennel seeds and simmer softly until all the moisture has been absorbed.

While the sausage sauce is reducing, you can boil a large pan of salted water for the gnocchi. Once it is boiling, put the gnocchi in and cook for about 3 minutes, or until the gnocchi begins to rise to the surface of the pan.

Once the gnocchi is cooked, drain and transfer the gnocchi, plus a little of the pasta-water (about a tablespoon or so) into the sausage mix. Stir everything together very gently, so as not to break the gnocchi pieces. This dish oughtn’t to be either too dry or too soggy; if it needs to be cooked a little longer to get a good consistency, keep it going. Otherwise, serve immediately onto plates and grate parmesan over if you wish.

Enjoy!

*due to translation issues, I made my gnocchi with walnut flour, not chestnut flour… I now have about 1kg of walnut flour. Next time I go to Italy I will learn exactly what the words for specific ingredients are, rather than hoping to wing it in English… the walnut gnocchi was excellent, if somewhat lacking in starch.
**I used polenta as I had no rice flour and this worked well.