Gnocchi with buttered cranberry pesto sauce

This was totally experimental and it happened to be one that turned out pretty good. If you don't know what gnocchi are, they're dumplings largely of potato and kneaded with flour to hold the dough together before being shaped into the little lumps that you see. So far, I've only seen them at Carrefour. I'm sure they can be found elsewhere as well.

This was a simple dish. I'm no a chef so only the simple culinary forays do not elude me. The ingredients are

• Gnocchi - can be bought from Carrefour. Comes in sealed plastic packs.
• Dried cranberries - ok I cheated, would have been juicier if I used the fresh ones. Might be sour though.  Dried is actually good.
• Pesto - jarred, easily available in supermarket. This one's from Carrefour. Butter.
• Olive oil - for flavour and to avoid dryness.

My method was to cook both at once. My brother helped me so I cheated. In 2 main steps...

1) For the gnocchi, the preparation is fairly simple. Bring water to a boil in a pot and add salt. After that add the gnocchi. The gnocchis cook pretty fast, say in a minute or two, so as soon as they float, scoop them out onto a dish somewhere. If you let them in the water too long, they will disintegrate as the flour that holds them gets dissolved in the boiling water.

2) For the sauce/pesto thingy, pan fry the dried cranberries into a pre-heated pan with butter. Press the cranberries so that they open up as much as possible for the flavour to come out. In this serving for 2, I used about a palmful of dried cranberries. Keep the butter plentiful enough so that the cranberries do not burn. After a minute and a half, add pesto and continue the stir for another minute or slightly longer. If the mixture starts to dry, add olive oil. Once everything is nice and bubbly, scoop the sauce onto the gnocchi.

Do not underestimate the small portions. These were quite filling. And they're easy to eat since the sauce is tangy and light. There's totally no meat, so vegetarians are free to try.