Cooking from the cupboard

One of the cooking challenges I enjoy the most is making something new using, and using only what I have on hand makes it even more of an interesting challenge for me. Saturday night, I did exactly that. It was very inexpensive, meatless—and far too much work.

The dish (photo above) was Kūmara gnocchi with Garlic Cream Sauce. I made the gnocchi myself, from scratch—I’d never done that before. I mention that first because, frankly, doing that was the most important part of it to me, and the motivator for trying the recipe.

The meal is adapted from a recipe from New World’s YouTube Channel (WATCH), however, theirs had a garlic cream sauce, with pesto sauce as a sort of garnishy thing (and that was supposed to be homemade, too, but, yeah, nah, that wasn’t going to happen). Instead of that, I combined store bought pesto with the cream sauce. The result was okay, I thought, and the original would’ve been okay, too (though I think the original should’ve included some onion, based on similar sauces I’ve made or had).

However: This recipe was waaaaaay too time-consuming: It took an hour and a half all up, so I won’t be making it again. I’m also highly unlikely to make gnocchi from scratch again, or, at least, I’d only make ordinary gnocchi, not the kūmara one (it was okay, but nothing special). Supermarkets sell really nice pre-made gnocchi, after all. still, I don’t regret making it—it was just too much trouble for not enough payoff. IMHO.

When I sat down to cost out the recipe, I realised I’d accidentally left out the 1/2 cup of parmesan cheese. Oops. The costs are probably more or less the same, though, because I used store-bought pesto. Your mileage may vary. The costs were:

Kūmara – orange: $4.00/kg, 500g used: $1.06. Plain flour: $1.33/kg, 1 cup (120g) used: $0.16 $2.50/250g jar, approx 10g used: $0.10. Cream: $3.6/250ml box, 1 used: $3.60. Grated parmesan cheese: $34.10/kg, approx 45g in the recipe: $1.53. Olive oil (panty staple): $10.70 per 1 litre bottle, approx 15 millilitres used: $0.16.

This means it came to a total of $6.55 for the entire meal (today, around US$4.04). This means it’d be $3.28 per person (today, around US$2.02) if two people were fed, $2.18 per person (today, around US$1.34) if three people were fed, and $1.64 per person (today, around US$1.01) per person if four people were fed.

It’d be fine for two people, definitely, and most likely okay for three, but I don’t think it makes enough for four people. Adding chicken would definitely make enough to feed four people, or the recipe could be increased—at additional cost, of course.

Thinking about it the next day, I thought the meal would’ve been better with the garlic cream sauce that the original recipe used, or, maybe if I’d included the parmesan cheese I would’ve liked it better. Regardless, neither of those changes the fact that making the gnocchi from scratch was too much work—and far too messy—to justify the effort when it’s just for me. I might do that if I was making it for the family, or if I’d made it for me and Nigel, but, yeah, it’s a lot of work. And that’s why if I make it again, it’ll definitely be with store-bought gnocchi. And maybe chicken.

Still, as it was, this recipe was cheap to make, meatless, and, for a change, used only stuff I had on hand, and that means it’s something I could, theoretically, make at any time. Yes, well, nice in theory.