Pasta with Mushroom Cream Sauce

Creamy Mushroom Pasta for a Monday Night

So, not this past week, but the week before, my husband gently expressed his slight weariness with having whole wheat pasta with pesto every Monday (and sometimes every Wednesday or Thursday as well) in the  few weeks after New Year, when I have been a bit busy.  But eating pasta on Monday nights while watching our Monday Night Serial (currently 'The Borgias') is one of our ingrained traditions.  So, I decided that a more exciting version of pasta was called for.  I thought I had come across a recipe for a creamy mushroom pasta on BBC Good Food, but it turned out that it wasn't exactly what I wanted for last Monday (even though it looks good).  So, I blithely assumed that I would easily find a recipe for a creamy mushroom sauce for pasta. But after about 20 minutes of looking, I hadn't found one that really fit the bill, and I needed to get doing on cooking it.  So, I created my own, and here it is (you may have noticed I did a live twitter update as I was cooking it).

Creamy Mushroom Sauce for Pasta


Ingredients


1 onion, chopped
4 bulbs of garlic
1 TBSP olive oil
1 TBSP butter
250g (or one supermarket sized package of) chestnut mushrooms, sliced
dried herbs to taste (rosemary, basil, oregano, etc.)
1 chicken stock cube (or veggie stock cube if making vegetarian)
1/2 cup dry sherry
250ml double cream
1tsp salt
100g parmesan cheese, grated

Method


Sauté the onion, garlic and mushrooms in the olive oil and butter (I chopped and added the onion, then chopped and added the garlic to it and then chopped and added the mushrooms).

Boil a kettle and add 1 and a quarter cups of water to the stock cube.

Add the herbs, the stock and the sherry to the pan and bring to a boil.

Now add the cream, salt and parmesan cheese and reduce to a simmer.

You can cover, turn off the heat and let it keep warm while you get on making your pasta.  I made whole wheat fusilli with broccoli.

Enjoy!