Potatoes are our ingredient of the season. You can find our full archive of potato posts here. And if you like pesto, give our Arugula Walnut Pesto a spin.

Potatoes may be our ingredient of the season, but in this post, nettles are definitely stealing the show.

Read on to see my simple tips for involving kids in your gnocchi making… or you could just teach them how to spell gnocchi and send them on a scavenger hunt in the pasta aisle. 

Gnocchi

I enjoy gnocchi well enough, especially when I see it on a fancy menu with truffle sauce.

When it comes to making my own, I haven’t mastered the technique. With many “tricky” recipes, I think that success can easily come from trial and error; as you’ll see below, there are a few reasons why that’s especially true for gnocchi.

But having a recent success making homemade pasta with the boys, I thought that it would be fun to experiment, improve my skills, and introduce them to another homemade pasta option.

I’m not going to write out a specific recipe for gnocchi. It sounds crazy, but I have a good reason.

I followed this gnocchi recipe and found the comments to be extremely helpful. You will immediately realize that the success of your gnocchi depends a lot on moisture. How moist your potatoes are after you cook them. How humid your kitchen is. etc. And so, the ratio of ingredients you use will also depend upon how you prepare the potatoes and that same kitchen humidity.

• Basic ingredients : potatoes, flour, egg, salt

• Begin by cooking your potatoes and then mashing them. If you do this in boiling water, the potatoes will be more moist than if you cook them in the microwave. If you cut up the potatoes before adding them to boiling water, they will absorb more water than if you boil them whole.
• See, so many variable just in how you cook the potatoes! BUT do not despair, because once your potatoes are cooked and mashed, you have control over how much flour you add to the mixture. Read the most helpful comments, to get their description of what the dough should feel like, and try to imitate that.

• Once you’ve added the egg and flour, and are satisfied with the texture of your dough, it’s time to cut it! Roll a portion of the dough out into a long snake and cut it into 1/2 inch pieces.

• Place the pieces gently into a pot of salted boiling water and cook for about 3-5 minutes. You can test your cooking time with one or two pieces before cooking a big batch. Depending upon the size of your pot, you will want to adjust the size of your batches, you want the gnocchi to have room to move as they simmer.

As you can see, we skipped the fancy decorative lines. Gotta leave some many things to improve upon.

Cooking with Kids

With homemade gnocchi there’s a lot of room to involve kids!

They can:

• help with mashing the potatoes
• roll the dough into snakes
• cut the snakes!
• make those decorative lines

As you can see from these photos, my boys (ages 5 and 3) were really into cutting the snakes. This type of easy cutting makes for great knife practice!

I let the 5yo cut his own pieces without any guidance. In that respect, he also got a bit of practice estimating the size of each piece and working to keep them consistent. The 3yo also got to cut, but I put little guidelines on his snake. That helped to ensure consistency, but it also gave him practice lining up the knife and keeping it steady on the lines.

Meanwhile, I had a pot of boiling water ready on the stove. After a kiddo was done cutting their snakes, I would immediately put their little batch in the pot, cook it, and then top it with pesto. That way they had the added thrill of knowing that they were eating the exact pieces that they had just cut. It’s a simple thing, but brings them joy, and it also made serving easier since they would eat immediately while I was boiling the final batches for C and I.

Stinging Nettle Pesto

Stinging nettles are something that you may have had an unfortunate run-in with at one time or another. The hairs, or spicules, along the plant’s stems and leaves act as needles, injecting histamines into your skin. That causes an almost immediate stinging reaction and rash in the affected area.

But for as much as they sting, when handled and prepared properly, this plant is yet another nutritious weed when ingested! It is full of iron, potassium, manganese, calcium, and Vitamins A and C.

Many sources say that you have to soak the leaves in water or cook them to remove the sting. That’s not the only way – you can also chop them up in a food processor and immediately eliminate any stinging danger. That latter is what we do in this recipe.

When it comes to pestos, you have the freedom to be creative. Blend a few ingredients, see how it tastes, and adjust as necessary. For this particular batch I even included a bit of catnip! Of course, you can always add basil or arugula. Walnut are our go-to pesto nut, but pine nuts are traditional. But you can experiment with other nuts (think cashews or almonds).

Even if you don’t work up the courage to make your own gnocchi, I hope you’ll find a patch of nettles and make this delicious and nutritious pesto. After you have some on your pasta, you’ll have enough left over for your morning eggs, and your afternoon cheese plate.