Pasta with mushroom sauce and spinach

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Although spring is finally here, the nights are still chilly, so my mom and I wanted something warm for dinner. I was in the mood for pasta, and I thought a mushroom sauce might be a nice way to use up the baby bellas in the fridge. But every recipe I looked at used tons and tons of cream, and I didn’t want something that rich. Finally I found this recipe by yesiwantcake, and with a few modifications it made for the perfect creamy-yet-light pasta dish. I used up all the mushrooms I had, but if you have more than I did I’d recommend loading it up!

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Homemade potato gnocchi with butter-thyme sauce.

I’ve always wanted to try my hand at homemade pasta. It always seems to show up as a challenge in cooking competition shows (my number 1 semi-guilty pleasure), and it seems like the perfect mix of daunting and rewarding. What better time to give it a go than on a day that looked like this?:

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I decided on gnocchi because I don’t have any sort of pasta roller and because if I had it my way the key food groups would be potatoes, pasta, coffee, and cheese, and this hit 3 out of the 4 of them. One of my favourite food blogs, Smitten Kitchen, suggested using a regular grater in lieu of a potato ricer, which turned out to be useful advice given that my sister took the potato ricer with her to college.

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I’ve had gnocchi before that was very dense or doughy, but I was very pleased by the way these turned out. I chose to make a butter sauce using thyme rather than a marinara or pomodoro tomato sauce so that I could cook the gnocchi in a pan after boiling them for a little bit of texture and crunch. They could’ve been a bit prettier – I’ll have to work on those fork-ridges – but of course, it’s the taste that really matters.

The weather’s meant to be back to warm and sunny tomorrow, but I’ll definitely be trying to make fresh pasta again the next bad-weather day.

Continue reading “Homemade potato gnocchi with butter-thyme sauce.”