Pan fried gnocchi – crispy, golden and buttery on the outside, soft on the inside, tossed with roasted pumpkin and spinach. This is one of my favourite ways to make gnocchi without blowing my carb meter and making a dreamy buttery sauce without using tons of butter!
I absolutely adore gnocchi. If I go to an Italian restaurant, chances are I’ll order gnocchi.
I put it above handmade pasta. That’s how much I love it.
And up until maybe a year ago, I was a total gnocchi snob. I would only ever have fresh or homemade gnocchi. Scarred from my uni days when I made store bought gnocchi and it was so chewy and tasteless.
But in the years that have passed, I must say that packaged gnocchi has come a long way and now I happily use packaged gnocchi!
Gnocchi is a potato flour dumpling, so it tastes like a cross between pasta and mashed potato. It’s soft on the inside, and when pan fried like in this recipe, it’s crispy on the outside.
Plain gnocchi, like pasta, does not actually have much flavour in itself. So it’s used with sauces and ideal for add-ins, like pumpkin and spinach which is what I’m using here.
So nowadays, armed with the convenience of store bought gnocchi, the only thing that holds me back from a weekly gnocchi fix is that it’s so high in carbs.
250g/8oz of gnocchi has 90g of carbs, 400 calories. And it’s super dense so it’s only about 1 cup in volume which isn’t enough for a meal (at least, not for me!)
Add a sauce and the calorie count starts hiking up quite considerably….
So to “lighten” it up and fill it out more, I like to add roasted pumpkin which has only 20g of carbs and 85 calories per 250g/8oz, almost 1/4 of gnocchi!
Plus roasted pumpkin is so juicy, it provides more “wetness” to this dish instead of adding more butter.
