Moan-Worthy

So with Gary gone on a business trip for the past week, I've pretty much been nutritionally subsisting on chips and hummus, pizza, salads, and veggie burgers.

But last night I was feeling culinary, so I did some grocery shopping and busted out some of my cooking know-how.

And the result?

Delicious!

Spinach-Basil-Roasted Garlic Pesto

Start out by making the pesto sauce. Chop the top off of one head of garlic. Place in a small glass baking dish with about 1 cup of veggie broth, a drizzle of olive oil, and smother the top of the garlic with oregano and a little dill. Cover with aluminum foil and bake at 425 for one hour. Let cool.

Next, in your food processor, blend a quarter cup of olive oil, a quarter cup of grated parmesan cheese, an entire 4-oz package of fresh basil, about one-quarter to one-third of a package of spinach, and a handful of cherry tomatoes. Blend until it's a nice smooth consistency, and salt and pepper to taste. Squeeze the roasted garlic into the food processor and give it one last whirl to work that in. Mmmmmmmmmmm, it's looking good already, huh?



From here on out, you could toss this pesto with any kind of pasta you'd like, or use it as a pizza base. But here's what I decided to do:

Onions, peppers, (soy) sausage, and potato gnocchi!

I browned up some soy sausage, the kind that comes in the Jimmy Dean-like tube. While that was cooking, I diced up some red and green peppers and some onion, and added that in with a good helping of black pepper. Cooked long enough for the onions to start to caramelize but not so long that the peppers got mushy.



Next, I boiled some frozen potato gnocchi. When that was done, I mixed together the potato gnocchi, the sausage and veggies, and the pesto sauce. I liberally added more olive oil and grated parmesan cheese. Then, at the very end, I mixed in more spinach so that it would just start to wilt.

For some final color, when plating I added some diced cherry tomatoes and dusted again with a bit of parmesan cheese.

Voila!