Darek + Stacie

These kind of went together, but I’m counting them as 2. Because it’s my blog and my rules.

I found the recipe for spinach pesto online somewhere, or maybe from another recipe; I can’t remember. Costco sells a huge tub of spinach for pretty cheap and spinach is better for you than basil (right?), so I went this route.

A little bit of the spinach:

It’s supposed to be made in a food processor, which would have been nice, but I don’t have one of those. So I used the blender and kept poking the spinach down. It took awhile. Olive oil, pine nuts, and seasoning went in. Again, I forgot to take an “after” picture.

It was a crazy color, but tastes pretty good.

So then I used the pesto in the next recipe. The recipe’s full name is actually Creamy Pesto Gnocchi with Green Beans and Ricotta, and I found it in Real Simple. There’s the link. It called for store-bought pesto, but mine was way cheaper.

Gnocchi:

Green beans (riveting pictures, I know):

And the finished product, looking…well…

Very green.

If you looked at the link, you probably noticed that ours looked nothing like the picture. And honestly I was a bit disappointed. It was ok, but the flavors didn’t really go together very well. I don’t really like gnocchi to begin with…but Darek loves it, and he wasn’t crazy about this either. It probably would have been better if I used the expensive store-bought pesto and used a lot less green beans than the recipe called for, but you could just put pesto on gnocchi and have essentially the same dish, much simpler.

We didn’t save the recipe.

Oh well. Better luck next time.