ASNN

angel hair pasta with mushroom cream sauce

I made a simple little sauce for some angel hair pasta tonight, but it turned out REALLY well. So I thought I'd share. :-)

• 1/4 C butter
• 1/2 C chopped shallot
• 8-12oz sliced mushrooms
• Bottle dry white wine (a $3.99 bottle of Berringer Pinot Grigio works great - you need 1/4 C for the sauce, and can easily drink the rest while cooking... ERRRR, that is, with dinner)
• 3/4 C whipping cream
• Handful of chopped fresh sage leaves
• Salt and pepper to taste

Throw the butter in a heavy skillet and melt over medium high heat. Saute the shallots in the butter for just a minute or so. Throw in the mushrooms and saute until browned, about seven minutes. Add the wine and whipping cream (interesting note - if you measure the wine and cream simultaneously in the same measuring cup, the milk will begin to congeal; this doesn't seem to affect anything, but it's kinda fun) along with the chopped sage leaves. Boil and reduce until the sauce coats a spoon. Salt and pepper to taste (though go easy on the pepper).

This sauce matches perfectly with angel hair pasta - boil a pound of it in water as salty as the Mediterranean for 4 minutes, no more. Toss it all together and serve. The angel hair is important as the sauce is likely to be a bit thin, yet it coats the increased surface area of the thin pasta exquisitely. For a little more meat to the dish, brown some flattened chicken breasts about halfway to done, and complete in the sauce while its reducing. Chicken goes atop the pasta, sauce goes atop the chicken.

Incidentally, Andrew (who didn't care for the wild mushrooms, or ANY mushrooms for that matter) had a tremendous idea that I'll be trying. He suggested we put some browned, crumbled spicy sausage in place of the mushrooms. The tang of the wine, the sweetness of the cream, and the spicy (Italian?) sausage... mmmmm...

One final note on the original dish: the inspiration for this was the fact that we had about 6oz of dried wild mushrooms (black, shiitake, porcini, etc.) from a gift basket of some sort. I reconstituted the mushrooms in hot water for about 10 minutes before combining them with 8oz of regular ol' fresh button mushrooms, sliced. The reconstituted wild mushrooms added a tremendous flavor to the sauce, but their consistency was terrible compared to the fresh mushrooms. If you've got the cash, get fresh wild mushrooms for the entire dish. To save a bit of scratch, go half-and-half wild and cultivated mushrooms, or just go all cultivated. (Just be sure to leave the gills - that gives the sauce the maximum mushroom flavor.)

Anyway, that's probably far more than you needed to know, but I was very pleased with this sauce, and will definitely be using it as a base for many simple and quick sauces to come!

Posted by pcg at May 5, 2005 1:48 AM