Gnocchi With Herbs & Tomato Sauce

Ready made gnocchi are generally available in supermarkets and in any Italian grocery store. Here in the Cleveland area, gnocchi are available from "Ohio City Pasta," which has a stand at the "West Side Market," located on W. 25th Street in Cleveland, and their products are also available in some supermarkets. You can also use penne pasta for this. 

Ingredients:

1 pound potato gnocchi
4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
2/3 cup chopped onion
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 can (28 ounce) crushed tomatoes, or diced tomatoes in juice
1/2 chili pepper, finely chopped
2 teaspoons rosemary 
1 tablespoon sage
1/2 pound Gorgonzola cheese cut into pea-sized pieces*
3 tablespoons heavy cream, half and half or canned milk 
fresh basil, chopped (garnish)

Heat the oil in a skillet or a sauce pan over low heat. Add the onion and saute for a couple of minutes, then add the garlic, rosemary, sage and chili pepper. Saute until the onion and garlic are just softened. Add the tomatoes and let the sauce gently cook over low heat until it thickens from reduction.** Now add the cream or milk and stir to mix. Meanwhile, cook the gnocchi in some salted simmering water, drain it, add it the sauce and gently mix it into the sauce. Top with the small bits of Gorgonzola, which will melt somewhat. Sprinkle some fresh chopped basil leaves over the gnocchi.      

* Gorgonzola is an Italian blue cheese, which is sold as "dulce;" that is, sweet and creamy, or as "piccante," which is sharper in taste and firmer in texture, as it is aged longer. I tend to like stronger flavors, so I use piccante. 

** Use a splatter screen to keep from having tomato sauce all over your stove, your walls, your floor, your ceiling, and maybe even your front porch. I swear, cooking tomato sauce is messy, but the screen allows the sauce to properly reduce, while containing the bubbling sauce. 

WORD HISTORY:
Gnocchi-This word is the plural of Italian "gnocco," which is a type of small dumpling. It is related to a number of words from Germanic including, "knuckle," "gnarl," "knoll," "knurl," "knock," "knot." Old Germanic had variant forms that produced the words I've listed above.^ Lombardic, a Germanic dialect/language of the Germanic Lombards who settled in northern Italy (the region of Lombardia/Lombardy is named for them), had "knocha," which meant, "bone, joint, bump," which was borrowed by Latin/early Italian and became Italian "nocchio," meaning, "a bump on a tree;" thus, "a knot on a tree." From this came Italian "gnocco" ("a bump, a lump"), which was then used for the small lump of dough used for dumplings. German has dialectal "Nock," meaning, "a small hill," which then came to be used in parts of Bavaria and Austria for a type of "flour dumpling," with its more common diminutive form, "Nockerl," literally meaning, "little dumpling."     

^ There is a theory that these words all go back to an Indo European form of, "gn/kn/gen/ken," which had the notion of "press, pinch into a compressed form or a ball."