Basil Pesto Gnocchi with Sun-Dried Tomato

20250812 #breakfastdiary 1481, 25°C/mostly clear I'm always racing the clock making breakfast, but I still put a lot of effort into plating. Of course, that's partly out of consideration for the many followers who essentially have to eat this breakfast with their eyes, and it's practically a basic virtue of running a food account online. Thanks to that, I've picked up a few plating principles over the past several years. (omitted) Third, odd numbers rule plating. The human brain finds slight asymmetry more appealing than perfect symmetry, so perfectly even numbers can actually feel unnatural and off-putting. So every ingredient that appears in a breakfast gets plated in odd numbers unless there's a special reason not to. But do I really have to follow that rule every single time? (My breakfast diary — to you, obsessed with plating) Breakfast and plating — sounds like an odd pairing, but a new episode of my daily-breakfast series covering something I'd always wanted to talk about just went up. Still couldn't let go of my plating obsession though — a roughly 445kcal basil pesto gnocchi with sun-dried tomato

2 cups store-bought gnocchi, 2T basil pesto, 1 sun-dried tomato, 1t lemon juice, Grana Padano cheese, pepper, olive oil

1. Blanch the (frozen) gnocchi in boiling water, drain, and toss with olive oil so they don't stick together. 2. Heat olive oil in a pan and cook the gnocchi until golden, then turn off the heat, add 10g butter, and coat it in the buttery flavor. 3. Spread basil pesto on a plate and top with the gnocchi. 4. Sprinkle over sun-dried tomato and a little lemon juice, then pile on plenty of Grana Padano cheese. Finish with pepper.