While there are fresh pasta shapes in my book An A-Z of Pasta, it leans more heavily towards dried. This means that the most common (unwritten) instruction is to buy a packet of pasta. Even when I wrote about a fresh pasta shape demanding a certain amount of dexterity (and time) – a process I enjoyed immensely – I also enjoyed writing, “Go and buy it”, because a packet of fresh lasagne sheets, nests of tagliatelle, belly-button tortellini or potato gnocchi (pressing endearingly up against the packaging plastic like kids in a car) is a wonderful reassurance that there will be dinner in eight minutes.
For this week’s recipe, buy two packets of potato gnocchi. Alternatively, you can make the gnocchi yourself. Which – and I don’t want to put anyone off here – turned out to be one of the more demanding shapes when writing the book. Both in terms of its ancestry, which is cloudy, and the etymology of the word, which is almost as complicated as macaroni, but also in a practical sense.
