Hi there Steemians:-)

So second week running and this week’s art material is the daucus carota AKA the humble carrot.

This originally tough, bitter root, now considered a sweet, moreish and greatly versatile vegetable is cultivated and utilised globally. It was actually consumed initially for medicinal purposes before its existence in the food world, and this is still commonplace in China (something I learnt since moving here from London).

However, I was not always a fan…. I still have memories of dinner ladies criticising me for leaving aside the green and orange sections on my plastic lunch tray (as well as an additional telling off for placing elbows on the table!). But over the years I’ve grown to love mother nature’s orange fingers (sometimes her purple, white or yellow ones!).

Fortunately, being an internationally grown and brilliantly cheap vegetable, carrots are easy to come by in China and in all different colours and sizes at no extra cost- bonus! So I thought why not go all out and use each colour available to me: yellow, orange and purple.

In the small town of Changde, I rarely have a variety of worldly cuisines available and I have had cravings for Italian food for quite some time now so the first thing that came to my mind (excluding pasta) was gnocchi. This squidgy, comforting potato pasta (substituted with carrot for my recipe) is perfect for any day and always puts on an impressive show at dinner parties so I thought, why the heck not! Although I’ve never made gnocchi with carrots so let’s see how this experiment turns out!

The components of my dish: squidgy carrot gnocchi with nutmeg butter, smushy, sugar roasted carrot , extra crunchy pistachio praline and intense, refreshing green pepper pesto.

Colourful Gnocchi

I started first with the gnocchi since it takes the longest of all to prepare. I did this by first steaming (rather than boiling to retain the water-soluble vitamins) and mashing the carrots (each categorised into their individual colour groups) into a smooth paste before combining with plain flour, a pinch of salt and an egg. I then kneaded this smooth dough for roughly 7 minutes before transforming it into thin sausage shaped rolls and cutting these into 3cm long bits…….
Unfortunately, my orange carrots were a little too hard to mash into the dough and I ended up with a white-orange lumpy ball of tremendously sticky dough which I refused to use in the final recipe so we’ll have to make do with the yellow and purple carrot gnocchi, which thank goodness, came out a satisfactory consistency.

The next step: boiling. The rule I go by rather than timing is to place these little doughy balls into a saucepan full of boiling water. The gnocchi will insist on sinking to the bottom of this mini ocean, but will float to the surface when the density has reduced and they have thus cooked. These can be left aside before distributing onto the plate.

Sugar Roasted Carrots

For the sugar roasted carrots, I cut raw carrots into cubes, glazed them with some oil and sugar and roasted in a hot oven for 25 minutes. On a separate tray, whole green peppers can be roasted also for 25 minutes.

Pistachio Praline

Meanwhile, the pistachio praline can be made. First start by placing roughly chopped pistachios onto a sheet of greaseproof paper tucked into a baking tray. Next, heat together 1tsp of water and 150g sugar in a saucepan. Do not stir and just leave to become a thick, brown, glossy caramel. Once this stage has been reached, pour the hot sticky syrup over the pistachios and leave to solidify. Once a solid, the praline can be broken apart or crushed as so wished.

Green Pepper Pesto

When 25 minutes are over, remove the vegetables from the oven. Leave the carrots aside but chop, peel and deseed the peppers. In a blender with olive oil, salt, 1 tsp white wine vinegar and fresh basil, blitz the peppers until nothing but a vibrantly green creamy liquid remains….This is ordinarily how I would do this dressing, but to my surprise, my trusty hand blender gave way and I had to make do with the end of a rolling pin and some plastic tupperware to achieve a smooth-as-would-be-possible paste. However, a refreshingly vibrant green paste was not the resulting mixture, but instead a pale green (my housemate described the colour as ‘snot’!) gooey-like consistency mess stared back at me from the bottom of the plastic container in which I attempted to pulverise it with a make-shift rolling pin. I tried my best to make it look more edible once plated- hope it’s worked!

Nutmeg Butter

Last but not least, melt the salted butter in a pan and sprinkle in the nutmeg. Gently transfer the gnocchi to this richly satisfying spiced lipid once the pan has been removed from the heat and carefully stir.

Assemble each of these components on a plate/bowl of your choice and tuck in!

In this post I would just like to thank my boyfriend who, before committing to anything upon his arrival back home from work, spends his first 1-2 hours in my kitchen setting up photography equipment and taking some kickass photos…but I guess he does get to eat blog-worthy food shortly afterwards so it evens out I guess!