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