JOANNA'S FOOD: family cooking, from scratch, every day


Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Mushroom sauce for pasta

Holiday time, and the children want lunch. Not leftovers, my staple, but lunch cooked from scratch. Mostly it's pasta, sometimes it's a pizza, if I remember to make the dough in the morning. Today we had linguini with mushroom sauce. It's cooked slowly to extract the maximum flavour, which makes it a good way to give those slightly dull supermarket mushrooms some taste.

Chop a couple of onions and sweat them slowly in a little olive oil. When they're soft but not brown, add some chopped parsley (and some garlic if you've got it; I ran out last night, and haven't been to the shops today). Stir, and then add in a little flour. When that's amalgamated, add chopped mushrooms - I used four large field mushrooms, one per person. Cook slowly for about 15-20 minutes. The liquid from the mushrooms should be enough to make a sauce, but if you overdid the flour (and I did), then loosen the sauce with a little stock or water.















Overall, it took about half an hour, with three bursts of activity of about two minutes each.

This would also be a good basis for a meat casserole, or you could turn it into a cream sauce with a dollop of creme fraiche. There's a little left over, and I'll chop fresh herbs into it and spread it on little toasts or biscuits as a starter. In the autumn you could use wild mushrooms from the countryside.

This is my entry for weekend herb blogging, hosted this week by Anh of Food Lover's Journey

4 comments:

Anh said...

Joanna, I am crazy over mushrooms but haven't slow-cooked them yet. I will try yout method soon! :)

Thanks for participating this week WHB.

janelle said...

Great minds think alike! I just made mushroom soup!

Helene said...

That´s absolutely right, we experienced it with mushroom soup at first. :)

Kalyn Denny said...

Sounds like a healthy recipe, and very tasty too!