Gnocchi Mac & Cheese

Original Image from The Cutting Edge of Ordinary

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Doesn't that look absolutely delicious?

I agree.

We love pasta in our house and gnocchi is no exception.  Interestingly, my husband had never had it before he met me.  I love introducing him to new foods.  Growing up in small-town Canada, he missed things like ethnic restaurants, food festivals, and foreign grocery stores.  But now he has me, and that makes up for everything.  Honest.

And this was another husbands-choice recipe.  When he saw it, he made the kind of happy-stomach noises that usually get made when I serve him something delicious.  If just a picture could garner such a reaction, what would the actual food do?  I had to find out.

This recipe is fairly straightforward.  If you live in an area that doesn't stock exotic cheeses at the regular grocery counter, you may have to do a bit of hunt and gather activity.  Or look up substitutions on the Internet.  Which, to be fair, is kind of what I did.

Ready for the oven

The cheese sauce was majorly thick.  This may be my fault.  Oh god!  It's the emmental!  Yeah, substitutions mess with more than just flavour, sometimes the texture gets off too.  But we like cheese.  We like thick saucy cheese, too, so it couldn't be that bad, right? I also threw just a little bit in the way of whole grain breadcrumbs on top for that extra crunch.

This is not a healthy dish.  If looking at that pot 'o cheese didn't convince you, let me do so now.  This will clog your arteries.  Eat it with discretion. Plan on a long walk afterwards.  Share it with your friends.  It is very filling.  It is also very, very good.

I served up this gooey dish with a tomato-heavy green salad and biscuits.  The top turned golden and beautifully crisp in the oven, and the gnocchi puffed up a bit, just as promised.  Unlike many gnocchi dishes, this wasn't sticky at all.  Not in a weird way, anyway.  It was perfectly creamy, which tells me the potato starch from the pasta must meld well with that cheese sauce.  Or something.  At any rate, it works.

This is a taste-bud pleaser, but only a small portion is enough to make you really, really full.  I couldn't even eat any biscuits, and trust me, I make killer biscuits.  This made about six main dish servings, rather than the four that a package of gnocchi usually delivers, mainly because of the rich, thick cheese sauce.

The Big Guy Commentary?  Make it again!