This 4-Ingredient Dinner Is a Lifesaver When I’m Too Tired to Cook (There’s Zero Prep!)

If you’ve never jogged through the Vatican listening to Jock Jams, I highly recommend it. It’s how I would work off all the pasta my college roommate and I would eat when she moved to Rome after graduation.

The best days of any visit were when she’d foist me on her next door neighbor, a woman my mother’s age, for cooking lessons. I did not speak Italian, she did not speak English, and while hilarity ensued, I learned recipes from her that I’d never found in books.

My favorite recipe gleaned from these lessons was to make a sauce that is simply vegetables cooked into submission, with a little butter and parmesan. The best version, in my opinion, is made with broccoli.

Spears that are simmered for about 20 minutes break down into a bright, chunky sauce that brings out the best of both the vegetable and the pasta. The plain flavor of the pasta allows the vegetable to shine, while the shape gives it something to cling to.

What has always appealed to me about this sauce is how few ingredients and how little effort this recipe takes. It has always been a great way to use whatever veg I’d bought with big ideas, but forgotten about.

But when winter slips in each year, I reach for potato gnocchi instead of another pasta. The heartiness of the gnocchi is like a warm hug, with each gnocchi a sweet little pillow of toasted potato. Against the broccoli sauce, this is a bowl of comfort—like an elevated baked potato with cheesy broccoli.

Choosing the Right Broccoli

While I’ve made this recipe with all sorts of vegetables (tomatoes, carrots, eggplant, peppers, zucchini, etc.), broccoli is my reliable go-to. Once cooked down, the broccoli is earthy and herbaceous, but not overpowering. It has a great texture on your tongue from the flowered end, and then a nice bite to the stem.

It’s easily available, regardless of the time of year, and doesn’t seem to suffer seasonally the way that tomatoes go tasteless in winter. The sauce benefits from more floret than stem, though you can use both.

More importantly, the recipe works with frozen broccoli just as well as with fresh, and means there’s zero prep time. Keep a bag of broccoli in the freezer and some gnocchi in the pantry and this is a meal you can whip out on a whim. If you choose frozen, look for florets that are as small as possible. If you end up with a bag of large frozen spears, bang it on the counter to break it up and break apart the large stems, or chop them into smaller pieces before they go in the pan.

If you use fresh broccoli, break down the head into small florets. The stem should be chopped into small pieces before heading into the pan, which will add a few minutes to your prep time but offers lots of flavor. 

What to Know About Gnocchi

Gnocchi is the happy medium between pasta and mashed potatoes. Each little pillow has a greater density than a similarly-sized rotini or shell pasta, but they also offer a lot more taste and are more filling.

Much like pasta, you can find gnocchi in both the dry shelf-stable goods and the refrigerated section. Keeping shelf-stable gnocchi around isn’t a bad idea, but it isn’t my first choice. I prefer the taste and freshness of the refrigerated version, and for this recipe, I usually use Rana Skillet Gnocchi. Since it’s pre-cooked, there’s no need to boil the pasta, which means this is a one-pot dish.

To really set off the earthiness of the broccoli sauce, and create a difference in texture, I like to toast the gnocchi in the skillet. This creates a crispy exterior and creamy interior. The key is to keep an eye on the pasta in the pan while toasting it so it doesn’t burn. The moment a side is toasted, flip them over to brown the other side.

Dinners for When You Can’t Even