Vegan pumpkin gnocchi with garlic sauce (recipe) 👩‍🍳🍂

One more recipe with pumpkins! 🍂
And this time we are approaching a little bit of Italian kitchen since the recipe is all about gnocchi 👩‍🍳

This meal is usually made of potatoes, flour and eggs but here I am making it vegan and adding something more than just potatoes - pumpkin puree. 🍁

This fall I really tried to include more pumpkins in my recipes since my family has a lot of them 🙈 And I am happy that all recipes turned out tasty and great!

In this recipe I made pumpkin puree from scratch (you will see how further in the post) but you can use bought one if your store has it. If you end up having leftover pumpkin puree - you can turn it into a soup by adding some more water/coconut milk and spices or you can save it for other recipes (you can even freeze it). I am planning to share one more recipe which includes a little amount of pumpkin puree so you can keep yours in the freezer for a couple of days until the recipe is published!

But now let's have some tasty gnocchi 😏

You will need:
This made me about 3 portions

• 180 g. wheat flour
• 2-3 small potatoes (weighed about 150g when peeled)
• 225 g. pumpkin puree
• 1 teaspoon of salt
• A pinch of nutmeg (optional)

For the garlic sauce:

• 4 tablespoons of vegan margarine (or butter)
• 2.5 tablespoons of frozen parsley (fresh is also fine)
• 4 cloves of garlic
  

Preparation

1. In order to make homemade pumpkin puree - cut a small pumpkin in half and remove its seeds. I also remove the stem.
   
   Place both pumpkin sides inside down in a baking tin.
   
   Put it in a preheated oven to 200 Celsius and bake for about 50 minutes or until it is very soft when poked with a fork.
   
   Then remove all the peel with a spoon.
   
   Mine got pretty watery so I drained the liquid out.
   
   Then just blend the pumpkin flesh until smooth and and it will be your pumpkin puree.
   
2. Peel the potatoes, put them into boiling water and boil for about 15 minutes or until soft when poked with a fork.
   
3. Once the potatoes are boiled, put them into a dry bowl and mash with a potatoe masher or simply with a fork until smooth.
   
4. Mix mashed potatoes, pumpkin puree, flour, nutmeg and salt in a bowl. At the beginning, you can mix with a spoon, and then knead with hands by adding more flour until the mixture sticks less to your hands.
   
   However, it should remain soft and may be slightly sticky, and you should not knead it for a very long time either.
   
5. Dust the cutting board with flour
   
   Put the dough on the board and roll out a somewhat rectangular shape, about 2 cm. thickness.
   
6. Cut the dough into strips (about 2 cm wide).
   
   Roll the strips a little by hand to make them more round and cut into small pieces.
   
   You can put a fork on each piece to make tiny ridges but it's not necessary.
   
7. Prepare the ingredients for the garlic sauce. Shred or mash the peeled garlic.
   
8. Boil about 1.5 liters of water in a pot and add carefully the gnocchi to the boiling water.
   
   Boil them stirring constantly, until they all rise to the surface, and when they rise, cook for another 1-2 minutes.
   
9. When the gnocchi start boiling start making the garlic sauce in parallel. Add the margarine/butter to a pan and melt it.
   
   Then add shredded garlic, parsley, mix and cook for 3-4 minutes. I also added a pinch of salt to the sauce but you can taste later and see if you also need some.
   
10. Add boiled gnocchi to the garlic sauce, mix and cook for another 5-7 minutes stirring constantly.
    

Once the gnocchi are cooked, you can serve them with some chilli flakes, pepper or vegan permesan!