What a day! Despite the rain and the wind, the chef from Everyone’s kitchen came along to the cooking group to harvest, make and share a lovely lunch.
On the menu this week:
Sweet potato gnocchi with tomato and broccoli sauce
Beetroot brownie with a red berry (from the garden!) coulis
We harvested:
- Lettuce, rocket, mizuna, chives, parsley for the side salad
- Sage, rosemary, broccoli leaves, wild garlic, beetroot leaves for the sauce
- Thyme for the gnocchi
- Berries from last year
Sweet potato gnocchi
Ingredients
6 medium sweet potatoes
800g of flour + 70g
4 teaspoon of salt
Optional: pepper, cumin, thyme
Preheat the oven to 200 degrees C. Poke a few holes in the sweet potatoes with a fork, and then bake them for 40-50 minutes or until tender. You’ll know they’re done when a fork can be pressed into the centre rather easily. Set aside to let it cool enough for you to handle them easily.
Combine the salt and the flour. Flour a work surface and pour your flour mixture onto the surface. Make a well in the middle of the flour.
Once the sweet potatoes are cool enough to handle, remove the skin, and mash them.
Flour your hands and begin working the sweet potato into the flour. Continue to work the mixture until it’s fully combined. You don’t want the dough to be sticky so keep adding flour until you get a nice dry dough. This could take a decent bit of extra flour if your potatoes were on the larger side.
Once fully combined, roll the dough into a ball and cut it into eight even pieces. Roll each piece into a long log that’s about 1/2 an inch thick. Cut pieces of gnocchi into 1 inch pieces. Gently toss each piece into flour to ensure that it’s dry and not sticky at any edges. Continue until you’ve cut out pieces from all of the dough.
Optional: using a gnocchi board or fork, press grooves into each piece of gnocchi.
To cook the gnocchi:
Heat a pot of salted water to a boil. Add in the gnocchi and let cook for a couple minutes. Once the gnocchi floats to the surface of the water, let it boil for 30 more seconds and then remove it from the water using a slotted spoon.
For the sauce we mixed: broccoli leaves, chopped tomatoes, wild garlic, beetroot leaves, black olives, garlic powder with a bit of salt and pepper and oil. Quick and delicious!
Beetroot brownie with red berry sauce
Brownie Dry ingredients
210g plain flour, (or sub spelt or wholemeal flour)
160g sugar, to taste
25g cocoa or raw cacao powder
12g seeds (pumpkin, sunflower, chia, …)
¼ tsp baking powder
¼ tsp baking soda
Brownie Wet ingredients
200g beetroot puree
165g melted chocolate
65g vegetable oil
3 tbsp milk
Method
Preheat the oven to 180°C. Line a 20cm square baking pan with baking paper.
Add all the dry ingredients to a medium-size bowl and mix until there are no lumps. Add all the wet ingredients to the bowl and mix until combined. Pour the batter into your baking pan and smooth the top.
Bake the brownies in the oven for 20-25 minutes (shorter if you like them fudgy, longer if you like them more crispy). The brownies are ready when the surface is dry. They will set more over time. Allow the brownies to cool in the baking pan.
Make a quick red berry sauce with 3 units of berries for 1 unit of sugar.
We used tayberries, strawberries and redcurrant!
Place berries into a saucepan with sugar. Set over a medium heat, crushing with the back of a fork until the sugar has dissolved and the berries have become saucy. Taste and add a little more sugar if the berries are particularly sharp.
Photo credit: Ula!
Grow Dundee 