I’m in the middle of a personal dilemma of sorts this week. I’ve been feeling extraordinarily exhausted and unmotivated, craving hibernation and inactivity and solitude as much as possible. However, my inner cheerleader (damn her!) has been trying her best to get me out of bed, out of the flat, doing something, anything.

I kind of hate her.

One of the results of this has been an awful lot of cooking going on.  Elaborate, multi-part recipes that take up most of the afternoon. Heavy, fragrant autumnal dishes that leave me feeling even more lazy and tired and unmotivated after eating them.

But so very, very yummy.

I’ll be extraordinarily fat by the time winter rolls around, at this rate.

This morning Doug asked me if we could do pesto pasta with chicken for dinner. I said sure. No problem.

Now, if I was sane I’d probably pop down to the import shop and buy a little jar of pesto and a box of pasta and a packet of chicken bosoms.  Prep time would be, um, maybe twenty minutes, including the time it takes to bring the water to a boil.

Did I do that?

No.

Let me show you what I did, and after you see what I did, I want you to imagine how insanely tired I feel now.

I made a few separate things throughout the afternoon that came together for dinner.

First, I made gnocchi. Not just pasta, not even ancient coin-shaped Arabian pasta, no. I made gnocchi. Gnocchi costs about 80 rmb for a little packet in the refrigerator section of the import shop. I’ve never bought it. 80 kuai just seems absurd for a dough product.

The Gnocchi

 

No recipe to link to, as this was something I already knew from yonks ago. It’s a rough approximation of a recipe for just under a kilo of the stuff. You can halve it if you’re just one person, or make the full batch and freeze 75% of it for later.

It goes something like this:

• 4 spuds, ideally Russet but anything you’ve got at hand is fine. Boil or bake until tender. I boiled mine, skins on. Less waterlogged that way.
• 1.5 cups of flour
• 1 egg
• Some salt

 

When your spuds are cooked, let them cool so you don’t burn your fingers when you grate them. Technically, you’re supposed to ‘rice’ them with a ‘ricer’ but I use one of those 5 sided standing graters. I use the same side as the one I use for grating cheese. What you want is something like mashed potatoes but without the clumpy density. The grating, one might say, lifts and separates.

Dump the cooled, riced spuds onto a cutting board, dust it with a cup or so of flour (I used 1.5 cups, you may need more or less depending on your spud) and crack an egg on top and throw on a shake or two of salt.

With your hands (which will get awfully goopy and doughy in this stage so make sure you have sufficient flour at hand before you dive in), mix the spud and flour and egg into a dough ball and gently knead it until it feels combined and forms a nice ball. It shouldn’t be wet or sticky if you have added enough flour. By the end, it shouldn’t be sticking to your fingers any more.

Cut the dough into quarters. Dust the sticky, newly opened sides with flour. Roll them into balls.

This recipe makes a sh*tload of gnocchi, to be quite honest. Far more than you could eat– unless you’re, say, a family of six. I boiled up 20 for the two of us for dinner and froze the rest. What you see above in that tray was only about half of the haul.

To cook the gnocchi is very simple.

Boil a big pot of lightly salted water. When it’s fiercely roiling away, gently add a half dozen gnocchi and watch them sink to the bottom. When they rise of their own volition after a couple minutes, they are done. Use a big slotted spoon to haul them out, draining the water. Repeat until you have all the gnocchi you need.

I put mine on a plate to wait until everything else was done.

 

The Pesto

 

You know how most people generally buy their pesto from the supermarket in jars? Or if they’re feeling particularly ambitious, they’ll haul out the food processor?

Not me.

I have a HUGE knife and I like to use it.

This is how to make pesto the hard way.

You need:

• A big bunch of fresh basil. Luckily City Shop had it in stock after a long absence. I bought enough to give me enough leaves to fill both hands.
• A lot of garlic. We used a head- partly for the chicken and mostly for the pesto. Chop it finely.
• Half a cup of grated Parmesan cheese. Try to get the blocks, if at all possible. Not cheap and not always possible to find but totally worth it.
• Olive oil and pine nuts. If you haven’t got pine nuts, no worries. Do without. No olive oil? Use sunflower or another neutral veggie oil.

 

For chopping the basil, don’t slice it like bread. Use the full weight and size of the blade, with one hand on the handle and the other hand on the far end, rocking the sharp blade up and down over the leaves. Thunk-thunk-thunk.  Like a really awful, bladey pendulum. You are that poor basil’s Sword of Damocles, realized.

When the basil’s been hacked to shreds, add the garlic and pine nuts and continue to rock the blade away. Up down, up down, landing first on the far end of the blade then back to the rear end and repeat until very very finely minced.

Note: What appears to be a bottle of ground cumin below is in fact just a handy storage jar for my pine nuts. Please do not be confused by it.

The Cream Sauce

 

This is basically a white sauce with a roux as a base- pretty much the same as I used for the Welsh Rarebit  last month.

You need:

• A big spoonful of butter
• A big spoonful of flour
• A cup or so of milk

 

When you’ve added the milk, slowly, stirring all the time until the sauce starts to thicken until, well, it has the consistency of a cream sauce,  add half of the pesto (that is, if you made as much pesto as I did…).  About 1/2 cup of fresh pesto should be fine, but more or less would also be okay.  The rest of the pesto (if you have any remaining) can be kept for tomorrow or frozen in an ice cube tray.

The Whole Thing Pulled Together

 

By this point, you should have some cooked gnocchi set aside, ready to go, and that little sauce pan of pesto cream sauce. If you’re vegetarian, now would be the time to toss the slightly cooled gnocchis with the sauce in the wok for a minute or so, heating it gently to your preferred temperature. You can go eat.

For the rest of you, we have a little chicken to go with.

For one meal with two people (with about 10 gnocchis each), I used one chicken bosom, very thinly sliced into strips, which had been marinated in olive oil, a pinch of salt, and about 25% of the garlic (3 or 4 cloves, I’d wager) for a few hours in the fridge.

Sautee those in the wok in a little oil of your choice, including the bits of chopped up garlic, until cooked. They’re thin so they don’t take long.

When the chicken is done, pour in the pesto sauce, stir a bit, then add the gnocchis and toss them about until coated.

That, my friends, is it. Done.

Thankfully my inner boarding house mother instincts took over and I made enough for at least two meals so I don’t have to do this again tomorrow.  I have a feeling I am the reincarnation of someone who had to cook for vast quantities of people at a time…