cooksimple.com

I’ve mentioned before that I LOVE gnocchi. And I especially love it with nice saucy, wipe your plate clean with crusty bread, sauce. This tomato sauce is a great fresh sauce that is a riff on a tomato with lemon confit from Garden at the Cellar.

Ingredients

• Plain potato gnocchi (frozen, fresh, or homemade)
• 8 large tomatoes, blanched, peeled, deseeded, and crushed (for this recipe 2 tomatoes per person is a good rule of thumb, everything can scale to that)
• 2 lemons
• 3 T olive oil
• 4 cloves garlic, crushed
• 1 t salt (more or less to taste)
• 3 T butter
• 10 large basil leaves, sliced
• Fresh ground pepper

Directions

In a large sauce pan over medium high heat, saute garlic in olive oil for about 30 seconds, careful not to burn the garlic. Add the tomatoes. Fresh tomatoes are pretty crucial to this. Canned tomatoes are a little too sweet and salty. Plus, it’s really fun to squish the tomatoes with your hands into the sauce pan.

Add salt and pepper to taste and mix well. Cook uncovered until to a consistency that you like. I typically just let it cook down while the gnocchi is cooking.

Place the gnocchi in deep bowls. Add the butter and lemon to the sauce and mix well. Spoon over the gnocchi and garnish with basil. Serve with a spoon or a big loaf of bread.