Spinach & Parmesan Bread Dumplings

My boys are fairly good at eating vegetables. They prefer them raw, and will eat any amount of tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, kohlrabi, and – their latest discovery – sugar snap peas. They are not as keen on cooked vegetables, but I think it is a texture thing as e.g. they won’t touch broccoli, but don’t mind it as soup, and I have had made similar experience with them, with e.g. pumpkin or celeriac soup. They will eat their body-weight in cooked peas and sweetcorn though, and Mr Fox especially will devour any corn on the cob you put in front of him. But one vegetable I hadn’t been able to get them enthusiastic about, in any shape or form, was spinach. Until I came across a recipe for spinach and parmesan dumplings in a German magazine my mum brought with her the other week. It’s a bit labour intensive, nut totally worth it. I already had some tins of sweetcorn on hand as a backup, but they gobbled them up and then asked when I could next make some more. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner!

Ingredients (makes 12)

• 375g (gluten free) white bread*
• 2 small shallots
• 1 Tbsp butter
• 210ml milk
• a couple pinches of nutmeg, freshly grated if possible
• 400g baby leaf spinach
• 3 eggs, size M
• 60g finely grated Parmesan

* Usually I hate the fact, that gluten free bread falls apart so easily, but in this case the floppier the bread, the better!

Directions

• Cut the bread in to small cubes.
• Peel and finely chop the shallots, then melt the butter in a saucepan and cook the shallots in it for a couple of minutes until they start to go translucent.
• Warm up the milk and season it with the nutmeg.
• Mix together the bread, shallots and milk in a bowl, then cover the bowl with a plate and set aside for 10 minutes, so that the bread can soak up all the moisture and the flavours can infuse.
• Meanwhile, bring a pot of salted water to the boil. Cook the spinach for about 1 minute, then drain and immediately run it under cold water until cooled down. Squeeze out as much water as you can, and finely chop it.
• Whisk the eggs and mix them in to the spinach.
• Add the spinach-egg mixture and the grated Parmesan to the bread mixture and knead well until you have a smooth-ish dough (if you want it even smoother, you can cut the crusts of your bread, but I quite like it with a few chunky bits in it).
• With wet hands, form 12 dumplings out of the dough (you will need to keep re-wetting them, so that the dough doesn’t stick to your hands). Cover them with a damp kitchen cloth, and leave to rest for another 10 minutes.
• Bring a large pot of salted water to the boil, then lower the heat. Carefully add the dumplings and leave to simmer for 10 – 15 minutes. Do not let them boil!
• To serve, drizzle the dumplings with some melted butter and sprinkle more grated Parmesan on top. We had ours with oven roast cherry tomatoes for the adults, and fresh, halved cherry tomatoes for the kids. The dumplings are so filling, that you really don’t need anything further with them. We had a couple left over, and they tasted very nice heated up for lunch the next day too.

This recipe was adapted from a recipe in Brigitte magazine.