Druidic Dumplings

This is a very fun little dish-thing that I like to make when I have leftover spinach. I usually buy these large bags of baby spinach that don't really keep all that well, and freezing it is not an option (else why would I buy fresh in the first place?)

So when the spinach starts to wilt just a little, and get all sad and lonely in the fridge, I use it for my Druidic Dumplings.

There are two simplest variations of this dish: the Italian, gnocchi-like one, where the other ingredient is mashed potatoes,* and the more Slavic one, where the other ingredient is quark cheese. What you will get here is the second variation, because the potato variation requires all that peeling and boiling and generally more work.

Ingredients

• Spinach
• Quark Cheese 
• Flour (equal parts of all three - by weight, not volume)
• Egg
• Salt
• Pepper
• Thyme
• Garlic
• Olive oil

Tools

• Food processor

Preparation

Clean and chop the spinach. Heat up a tablespoon of olive oil in a frying pan and blanch the spinach with garlic. Set it off to cool down.

When it's cold, put the spinach in the food processor with the quark cheese and blend until you get a lovecraftian-looking green mass.

Mix the lovecraftian-looking green mass with flour and egg until you have a firm but flexible portion of soft dough.

In a pot, boil a large amount of water with a teaspoon of salt. Roll your dough into a long strand, then use a knife to cut off small-ish, even portions. Dump them into the boiling water, and stir very gently.

Boil for about 3-4 minutes. Take one out and cut in half to test before you take them all out.

Since it's spinach-based, I like them most with the same sauce I use for my penne primavera -  based on feta cheese and tomato. But if they're done well, they're just as good with just a bit of butter, a spoonful of cream, or just some leftover quark cheese crumbled on top. They go very well as a side dish for meat stews, too.

[* This variation is actually fairly typical of Toscania, where they don't see anything remotely druidic in it. However, I'm not about to make green dumplings and not call them Druidic Dumplings. Come on.]