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In homemade how-to number 6, I showed you how to cook fluffy, foolproof baked potatoes that can even be made ahead. Gnocchi and cheese baked potatoes are a decadent dinner with a lightened up cheese sauce to put your new skill to work!

It’s potato madness: baked potatoes and potato gnocchi meet in a ridiculous, over-the-top, must-try comfort food dinner. Let’s just say this would be a good one to reserve for after a big athletic event. Or when you’re stuck inside and in sweatpants on a rainy day. Or…tomorrow night. If you need a redeeming factor for all that cheese, the recipe boasts a significant pile of broccoli for color, health, and the happiness of broccoli lovers like me. Broccoli and cheese: always better together. Always betters with carbs.

While this meatless main dish or somewhat obnoxious side dish is a bit decadent, the cheese sauce isn’t the worst splurge. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it “skinny” or “healthy”, but “lighter” might be a fair interpretation. I’ll let you be the judge: The liquid is split 50/50 between cream and almond milk, and it’s gluten free. Many cheese sauces contain flour in the form of a roux, but, as I discovered in my latest favorite mac and cheese recipe, you needn’t go through the trouble of all those dirty dishes and utensils or long list of ingredients for the creamiest, smoothest cheese sauce you’ve ever tasted.

After making these cheese sauce as simple as it gets, I got a little obsessed with streamlining the rest of the recipe so you can enjoy these decked out spuds even on a busy weeknight. I know, it doesn’t exactly look like a weeknight recipe, but hear me out. As you’ll learn in my perfect baked potato tutorial, you can make the potatoes ahead and still have them nice and fluffy a few days later. The broccoli is chopped small enough that it cooks in minutes on the stovetop, and then comes the real kicker.

There’s no giant pot of boiling water to contend with just for the sake of cooking a cup of gnocchi. That’s right: heat up some olive oil in the single skillet you use for the entire recipe (one pan dinner!) and toss in your pasta. Five minutes later, you have crispy-on-the-outside, tender-one-the-inside gnocchi without the slightest raw taste. After testing and photographing this recipe, my hubby and I stood around the photo setup at 4 PM on a Saturday just scarfing gnocchi dipped in cheese sauce. Who needs chips and salsa when you have that going on? The only thing I need now is two-a-day workouts for the next week.

Rounding out the quick meal factor, after pan frying my gnocchi, I wiped out the same skillet and made cheese sauce in it, which easily took under 10 minutes. I love to cook and I don’t think every dinner must require 30 minutes or less, but if you make the baked potatoes ahead of time, I think this one could truly clock in under half an hour.

After all this talk about gnocchi-topped baked potatoes as if it’s a normal dinner, I have to concede that the idea is a little crazy. Crazy and must-try, which is what I was thinking as I ordered a much fancier version of it at Austin’s Foreign and Domestic on my honeymoon last fall. You can see the pictures of the meal that inspired my gnocchi and cheese baked potatoes in this post, along with some of our other delicious Austin eats. It was exactly the kind of restaurant meal I love, which can be hard to come by: familiar with some serious culinary flair, fun to eat, memorable, and an inspiration to everyday cooking.