Crispy Gnocchi and Rice-in-a-Mug
Crispy Gnocchi and Rice-in-a-Mug
Learn Margaret Eby’s trick for making a single serving of rice
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“Being in the kitchen,” writes Margaret Eby, “can be a source of joy and experimentation and meditation. It can also be a Groundhog Day-level nightmare to realize oh god, I have to make dinner again??? Both things are true—cooking is wonderful, cooking is a pain.”
I ricochet between these two extremes. Margaret’s new book, You Gotta Eat, offers help. It’s organized by your energy level and keeps things both radically simple and really flexible. There are nine simple formulas for meals made by opening a can of beans—no heating required. There are tips for dialing up the flavor of simple sandwiches (try marinated artichokes in a mayo-free tuna salad). There’s permission to skip pans completely and lean on your microwave. More advice book than recipe book, You Gotta Eat does it all with humor, and Margaret’s expertise in the kitchen shines through.
I talked to her on this week’s podcast about how to find inspiration even in the deepest cooking rut, her self-saucing crispy gnocchi sheet pan dinner (full recipe reprinted below), how to easily make rice for one in a mug(!), and the cookbooks she relies on most at home. Margaret also offered advice to a listener who called in seeking dinner ideas for when the fridge is pretty pared down.
I highly recommend that you give it a listen; scroll down for all the links and recipes you hear about on the episode.
Fall cooking
Tomatoes are past their peak; the melon I bought was mushy. But I'm so excited that it’s chicken-roasting season again. I often rub the salted bird with lots of mustard—today’s sponsor, Maille, makes an Original Dijon and a Whole Grain Mustard that both work well—then roast on top of sturdy vegetables. Potatoes love those drippings, as do parsnips or radishes, and I’m grateful to Helen Rosner for spreading the word about chicken roasted on cabbage.
Over the weekend I also roasted a bunch of squash to add to a few different meals; these boneless chicken thighs rubbed in red curry paste were a great pairing and a nice way to use up the curry paste leftover from making crispy rice salad.
In this week’s podcast episode, Margaret told me that the moment it’s cool enough to make lasagna is considered a holiday in her household; she loves Julia Turshen’s recipe—called “A Nice Lasagna”—which calls for store-bought crème fraîche instead of requiring you to whisk up a béchamel. Another recommendation: Turshen’s string beans with ground pork, ginger, and red pepper flakes; both of these appear in Small Victories. (Book links here are, as usual, affiliate links.)
More recipes Margaret cooks on repeat:
’s Sheet-Pan Baked Feta With Broccolini, Tomatoes and Lemon (NY Times)Madhur Jaffrey’s Masoor Dal (Happie Foodie)
Rachel Gurjar’s Crispy Tofu with Peanut Sauce (Bon Appétit)
Alexa Weibel’s Vegan Cacio e Pepe (NY Times)
Deb Perelman’s Mac and Cheese and Pizza Beans (Smitten Kitchen)
Famous Avoca Scones
’s Salt and Pepper Eggplant (excerpted from To Asia With Love on DiasporaCo.com)
English Muffin Tuna Melts (Simply Recipes; Margaret usually skips the bell pepper)
I also mentioned Hetty’s One-Pot Udon Noodles With Kimchi and Cheese as an option for our call-in listener—it’s great for anyone whose fridge happens to have cheddar and kimchi and not much else.
Margaret’s go-to cookbooks right now
Khushbu Shah’s Amrikan (don’t miss the makhani mac and cheese)
All the Smitten Kitchen books
Everything by Madhur Jaffrey (there’s a recently-released edition of Indian Cookery)
Joe Yonan’s Cool Beans
Everything by Hetty McKinnon
Entertaining by Martha Stewart (this is one to look out for at used book shops!)
Margaret’s Crispy Gnocchi and Tomatoes
Recipe excerpted from You Gotta Eat. Copyright © 2024 by Margaret Eby. Used with permission of Quirk Books. All rights reserved.
This recipe harnesses two of my favorite things: throwing everything on a sheet pan rather than cooking individual components, and crispy pasta. As good as regular pasta is, crispy pasta is even better. To quote “Uptown Funk”: “Don’t believe me? Just watch.”
2 pints (about 4 cups) cherry tomatoes
1 pound dried or frozen gnocchi
¼ cup olive oil, plus more to taste
Salt and pepper
1 6-ounce block feta, cut into roughly 1-inch slices
Optional
1 shallot or ½ red onion
¼ to ½ teaspoon red pepper flakes
Handful of spinach or arugula
Find a sheet pan, a cutting board, a big mixing bowl, a knife, and your ingredients, and turn your oven on to 400°F. Slice or snip up your shallot, if using. If you don’t have a shallot, a red onion will work too, and if you don’t have either or just don’t like onions, skip it. Don’t worry about getting the pieces super thin—just make them as regularly sized as you can. Toss the shallots, tomatoes, and gnocchi in a mixing bowl with the olive oil, 2 pinches of salt, and about 10 grinds or shakes of black pepper. Add the red pepper flakes too, if you’d like.
Toss them around until everything looks evenly coated with oil, salt, and pepper, and dump them out onto a sheet pan. Try to make sure that everything is evenly spread out—if the ingredients are on top of each other too much, the gnocchi won’t crisp, which would be perfectly edible but, you know, not crispy. If there’s too much on the sheet pan for that to happen, just take out an- other sheet pan and divide the contents equally-ish between them. Nestle your slices of feta in between the other ingredients on the sheet pan, and drizzle those with a little more olive oil.
Pop the sheet pan into the oven, and set a timer for 30 minutes. Go about your life. When the timer goes off, check the sheet pan. You want the cherry tomatoes to have burst and to maybe have a little char on the outside, and the gnocchi to be getting golden. If they’re not, bump up the heat to 450°F and give them another 5 to 10 minutes. It’s OK if a few gnocchi or tomatoes come out blacker than the others, those will just be extra crunchy. Once they’re at the right level of cooked, pull the pan out of the oven. Take a bite to taste for seasoning, and add more salt and pepper if you want. If using, scatter spinach or arugula over the top of the pan and mix it into the gnocchi-tomato-shallot mess. Ladle into a bowl or eat right off the sheet pan.
Brought to you with support from Maille, crafting premium Dijon mustard in France since 1747.