Beet Root Gnocchi

Well howdy partner! Boy are you in for a treat today. This is one of those experiments that paid off straight away, and mind you, I could fill a book with my less fortunate trial-and-errors. This is my spin on a recipe for pumpkin gnocchi from Delicious:Days. It looked so juicy that I had to wipe off the drool from my keyboard after reading it. Only, when I looked for pumpkins at my local green grocer there were none in sight. But then something brownish red entered the corner of my eye: Good old sturdy beet roots. And with a little afterthought, I ended up buying two big fellas for my gnocchi. I couldn't get over the sheer daring of it all. But what can I say, I'm a kitchen rebel with a very good cause indeed. Well. As for the recipe, I won't be writing it here as you can see it with the link above.
What I will tell you though, are the few changes I made to the recipe. As it says in the original "script", wash, peel and slice the beets to thin slivers. Cook them in the oven as stated in the recipe, but be prepared to wait about 20 min. longer for them to soften. I ended up throwing the beets in a chopper-thingy and putting the tiny bits of beets back into the oven to speed up the process. When they were finally soft enough to sort of purée (it was more like 230 grams of sticky paste), I added the rest of the ingredients (egg yolk, salt, pepper, but no nutmeg) and stirred until it became sticky and shiny. Even though I didn't have the 450 grams of vegetable purée the recipe asked for, it still needed a whole egg yolk. As for the flower, 50 grams were plenty for this mixture. Then I rolled it, cut it into individual gnocchi. Cute and fluffy little dumplings of sweetness. Nice. And even though there was quite a lot of flower on them, they cleaned up real nice as they say Hollywood.

Despite the slight resemblance to raw tuna or bits of meat, they were absolutely heavenly with the sage butter (also in the recipe mentioned above), plenty of flaky sea salt and parmesan cheese to counter the sweetness of the beets. Actually, I was so pleasantly surprised by the outcome, that I had to call T and let him in on my delight.

Now go on, give it a try in your own kitchen. It's totally worth the flowery mess.