Festive cooking

December 15th Essence had an online festival cooking workshop held by Nicki, Josi and Dalma. Whereby they explained how to make vegan gnocchi with a delicious tomato sauce.

The workshop started off with a bit of an obstacle whereby one group had a late team member with the potatoes. But Dalma, Josi and Nicki had some good questions to ask the others to discuss, for example top 5 most disliked food.

When all the groups got their potatoes ready everyone started to make the gnocchi. Everybody had some different techniques but the final product was amazing.

We started by washing and peeling the potatoes and cutting them into smaller pieces. After the cutting, the small potato pieces were boiled until soft. This was followed by draining the potato and letting it cool down for a bit.

When cooled the potatoes were smashed into a potato mash and the flower, a bit of oil and salt and pepper were added. Making it a dough-like texture.

This dough was rolled into little balls and everyone had their own techniques for it. Whereby Dalma made a long roll and cut of small pieces and Femke made small balls and glided it over a fork making stripes over the balls.

When all the gnocchi balls were made and there was no more dough leftover we all started cutting the cherry tomatoes in half and slicing the garlic into small slices. Whereby it was hard not to snack on all the tomatoes.

Now we were ready to cook the gnocchi and sauce.

First, we started boiling the water adding some salt into it. When the water is boiling the gnocchi could be added, you know when it was finished when the gnocchi started floating in the water. When ready set aside and can be added to the sauce to warm up.

Now for the most important part making the sauce. Start by adding a generous layer of olive oil to the pan to begin to start frying up the garlic until a soft golden color. When golden adding the spices of thyme, oregano, chili flakes, pepper and if owned some parsley and basil.

After a short minute, the tomatoes can be added cooking until the tomatoes are a little softer and adding some water from the pot the gnocchi cooked in.

The cooked leftover water can make the sauce more creamy but also add salt to the sauce.

When the sauce was done we added the gnocchi back in heading it back up a bit but also getting all of the flavors over the gnocchi.

Now it was finally time to enjoy our own cooking dinner!

The gnocchi was super good and even Remy said that

'This was the best gnocchi I ever had!'