Roasted carrot gnocchi with rosemary & white wine

This past week has been both very good and very bad. Good since spring finally seems to be arriving and bad since I’ve been busy in the evenings, leaving way too little time to cook. Thank god for leftovers is all I can say! I’ve realized I’m a leftover hoarder. The little freezer compartment we have is stuffed with containers and I’m guilty of putting every single one of them there. But back to the good news, spring is springing! Unfortunately it hasn’t sprung far enough yet to provide some new vegetable to choose from at the farmer’s market yet. I am so lucky to live close to several great markets that sell fresh produce every week. All through winter, every weekend I’ve been faced with the same hard decision: carrots, potatoes, sweet potato or winter squash? I love all these winter vegetables, I really do, and shopping at a farmer’s market makes buying seasonal produce so much easier because you simply can’t buy the unseasonal stuff. I must admit I’m looking forward to some new choices later on in the spring, but for this week I went for carrots. This is what they ended up becoming: roasted carrot gnocchi with rosemary and white wine sauce.

Making gnocchi is actually a lot simpler than most people think. All you have to do is to cook and roast a root vegetable of your choice, in this case carrots, and puree and mix them with some flour. Roll the dough you get into a roll the thickness of your index finger, cut it into pieces and cook in salted water. What you do from there is up to you. You can mix gnocchi with pesto or tomato sauce, fry them or bake them or have them as they are. Here I cook them in a sauce of white wine and rosemary, simple and delicious.

Serves 2

A good handful of almonds

400 g carrots (about 4 average sized ones)

1 ½ clove of garlic

2 springs of rosemary

1 dl semolina flour

2 tbsp. water

A dash of grated nutmeg

½ yellow onion or 1-2 shallots

2 dl white wine

2 dl cannellini beans (or cranberry beans or small white beans)

Salt

Pepper

Olive oil

Roughly chop the onions. Roast in a dry pan until they start to brown. Remove from the pan.

Heat the oven to 200°C/400°F. Chop the carrot in rough pieces and finely chop ½ clove of garlic. Place them in an ovenproof dish with a splash of olive oil, some salt and a spring of rosemary, torn into smaller pieces. Roast for about 30 minutes until the carrots are soft and have started to brown slightly.

Once the carrots are done, puree them using a mixer or blender. Transfer to a bowl and add the semolina flour and some grated nutmeg. Using a fork or your hands, start mixing the carrots with the flour. Add the water gradually until you have a cohesive dough. Place the dough on a floured surface and roll it into a roll with a diameter of about 1 cm. Cut the roll into 1 ½ cm pieces.

Start heating a big pot of lightly salted water. Chop the onion and the remaining garlic and the leaves from the second spring of rosemary. Heat a pan big enough to later fit the gnocchi and add a splash of oil. Gently sauté the onion and garlic with the rosemary until the onion is soft. Add the white wine, some salt and pepper and bring to a simmer. Add the beans and cover with a lid.

Your water should be boiling now. Add the gnocchi to the water, but only so many that they have room to move around. You might have to cook them in two batches. You know that the gnocchi are done when they’re floating on the surface. As they start popping up to the surface, add them to the pan with sauce. Once you’ve cooked them all, add about 1 dl of cooking water to the pan and let the gnocchi cook in the sauce for just around 3 minutes, until the sauce has started to thicken from the starch in the gnocchi.

Serve the gnocchi with the roasted almonds and a nice green salad.