Spanagnocchita, redux

I made a version of spanagnocchita last night.
(Just quickly, if you're new here, you should go and read this before you keep reading this.)
To recap: the photo of J's spanagnocchita was really pretty and made me feel like something delicious was trapped inside that weird concept. I wanted to try it for myself, but with some improvements based on J's feedback.
You will recall that the basic method involves layers of bechamel, gnocchi, and spinach with  pine nuts, currants and cheese. 
I basically followed this method, but here's what I did to crank up the yummy.

Fresh gnochs.

Little friends

I made fresh gnocchi because the stupid supermarket I went to had sold out of the regular stuff and even though I am quite lazy, making spanagnocchita without gnocchi seemed pretty dumb. Also, I figured it would probably be delicious. After I boiled it, I pan fried it in butter with some spring onions. I basically did this because I love a pan fried gnoch. 

Little friends pan fried in butter. My favourite kind!

 Silverbeet
I sauteed the silverbeet in butter and garlic because butter and garlic makes everything delicious. I forgot to take a photo of it though, so here is a picture of the pan fried gnochs.

Feta
The original spanagnocchita did not use fetta. WTF, right? Why would you make anything spanakopita related and not include feta? I wasn't going to be part of that, so I pretty much replaced most of the cheese in the recipe with feta, with the exception of the grated parmesan that goes in the bechamel, which I kept.







Croutons.

As Cloud Control noted in his comment on J's original post, surely the charm of spanagnocchita lies in its ability to marry two carb-intensive dishes. The original recipe does not take advantage of this opportunity. I decided to make some croutons and sprinkle them on top to right this wrong. I love a crouton. They are daggy, but delicious, like Golden Rough chocolate bars and scotch finger biscuits.

That's pretty much all I did! Sadly, I forget to buy currants and pine nuts, so they were in no way involved. But everything else was pretty much as per the recipe. I assembled it all, put it in the oven for 20 minutes and then when it was all golden and bubbly, served myself a plate




Look guys, it was kind of OK. It was pretty good I guess. The feta, croutons and buttery garlicky silverbeet definitely helped. But you know what's better? Baked gnocchi. And spankopita.  Separately.

I should have just trusted you mate.  From now on, my tummy is going to believe everything you say, and stop getting caught up in the false promises of a pretty picture.