Making Dinner at the End of the Week

My regular practice is to do the grocery shopping at Whole Foods once per week, with a supplemental trip to Trader Joe's or Costco or a conventional supermarket as needed, but usually no more than once per month.  With that schedule, putting dinner together towards the end of the week can be a challenge, unless I cop out and tell Glen that we're going out, or we are in gardening season so I have a ready supply of fresh vegetables.  This past weekend I did the marketing on Saturday, so I suppose that today (Wednesday) qualifies as "towards the end of the week."

Sitting in a conference room at work this morning, waiting for colleagues to show up for a telephone interview we had scheduled, I mentally reviewed the list of what was left in the vegetable bin.  Turnips.  Mushrooms.  Some spinach.  One red onion in the pantry.  Maybe do something Asian and make some sushi rice?  Figure out a way to incorporate a poached egg?  But what about those gnocchi that had been hanging around for a while?  Somehow that appealed more.

So, we ended up having a spinach and roasted red onion salad, along with gnocchi with turnips, mushrooms, and brown butter.  Here's what I did.  After peeling and halving the onion lengthwise, I cut it into wedges and tossed it with olive oil and some salt and pepper before putting it into the trusty little convection oven at 375 degrees.  It took about 35 minutes for the onion to roast, and then I tossed it with some very good balsamic vinegar.  I added the onions to the spinach, which I also dressed with some balsamic vinaigrette and sprinkled with some salt and a grind of pepper.

For the gnocchi, I quartered a fair number (probably about 10 oz.) of cremini mushrooms, and then I peeled four small turnips and squared them off, so that I could dice them into little cubes.  While sauteeing them in some olive oil, I minced some garlic, which I added to the turnips and mushrooms when they were pretty far along, and I browned about 3 tablespoons of butter.  Finally, I cooked the gnocchi in a pot of boiling, salted water.  Once they were done, I added them to the turnips and mushrooms, along with the brown butter, and tossed the whole mess together.  Of course it made sense to garnish with some good Reggiano-Parmigiano cheese after plating the gnocchi up with the salad.  It would have been nice to add some sage to the gnocchi, but I'll try that next time.