Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Frugal Recipe of the Week

Ron has a love of gnocchi that has remained unfulfilled since moving to Savannah. None of the Italian restaurants have it on the menu and I can't find any frozen in the grocery stores. I have been pretty overwhelmed at the idea of making pasta, but when I saw this recipe it didn't seem to hard.

Now I know that it's not totally from scratch, but it came out really tasty. It was actually pretty easy, although it did leave the kitchen in a huge mess. Since the only ingredient I actally had to purchase was the instant potato flakes, it was incredibly cheap. I did buy some pesto sauce on sale to dress the gnocchi in, so the total grocery bill was about $5. I doubled the recipe so that we had leftovers. If you calculate the approximate price of the flour and salt and pepper and that I have quite a bit of leftover potato flakes, the cost per serving must have been about $1.

Tips if you try this: Give yourself a lot of counter space to roll out the dough, have a lot of flour on hand for the knife and counter, cut the dough into nickel-sized pieces since they plump a bit when cooked. Next time I'm going to try to incorporate other flavors - maybe spinach or basil.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

lets try a gluten free vegan version of this. I love fancy pasta

dirty bird said...

It's exciting to check the site and see 3 new posts all at once!
I got Gourmet magazine for myself this year and there are some 'simple' homemade pasta recipes I want to try - sounds good. I'm jealous about the NC trip - if I can ever get the $$ for another visit down there, I'd love to do something like that with you guys.
Oh, and the long-awaited death's head box is on my site - go see, but don't tell ron! I'm gonna mail it down there soon with some yankee staples.