Sunday, August 03, 2008

Spamcakes and pesto gnocchi


This was a kind of a lovechild of a thought. And that thought was 'I've got so much left over bread ends and edges from making sandwiches for 50. I don't want to waste them.'. And thus the idea of these spamcakes were born. I had imagined this to be a fairly easy task, but the making of the bread bits took me a little more than 2 hours of the morning and by the time the cooking was done, it was past the usual lunch hour.
  • 2 cans of Spam, mashed
  • 6 eggs, beaten
  • 1/4 block of butter
  • 2 small onions, diced
  • diced bread (I think breadcrumbs don't work)
  • some coarse grain pepper
Allow the butter to soften or melt them in the microwave. Add them into the eggs and whisk a little. Pour in the diced bread, spam and diced onions.

The bread will start soaking up the egg mixture. So what you do next is to use your hands and knead everything together. You can add in the pepper at this point. Massage them until you feel that they are well mixed, then start shaping them in to little patties. Fry them in low heat over the pan with little or no oil.

The only thing I thought could have been better was that I might have fried the diced onions a little before mixing them into the rest of the ingredients. The low flame pan fry didn't quite brown the onions. The resultant taste was a bready spam like fritter with the texture of hash browns.


I'm sure there are numerous ways of doing these gnocchis out there. Here's how I did mine. The ingredients are relatively simple and none of them are actually made by myself. With the exception of some lovingly hand diced tomatoes.
  • box of gnocchi (estimate base on your needs, this is 50 gnocchis)
  • pesto (jarred, bought from Carrefour)
  • olive pate (also jarred, also bought from Carrefour)
  • some parmesan cheese
  • 1 diced tomato
Put the gnocchis in a pot of boiling water that has a little salt. They cook fast so don't leave them alone for too long. Approximately 2 minutes does the job. Meanwhile, spoon out the pesto and mix with 1 small heapful teaspoon of the olive pate. Mix and heat slightly. You can also dice the tomato at this point.

Drain out the gnocchis into a bowl and pour the pesto mixture in to toss gently with the diced tomatoes. Add shaven parmesan. Eat.

3 comments:

  1. Spamcakes? Sounds unhealthy so it has to taste good. I've got this recipe for Spam pie that I've yet to find time to try... maybe soon..

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  2. ahh i love reading your blog especially those small snacks stuff.. but the black background makes the words really hard to read! ):

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  3. @ D
    I'll be waiting to see that spam pie on your site.

    @jiaying
    I've gotten a few feedbacks on the color. I'll look into changing them.

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