Cooking for Pleasure: Pasta with mushroom sauce

We served this with hot focaccia, a green salad and lots of wine. Bon appetit!

Ingredients for the pasta with mushroom sauce. (Photo by Patty Schied)

By Patty Schied

A few months ago, I visited a friend in Washington who asked me to cook a vegetarian dinner for a dinner party.

This didn’t sound daunting since I had prepared vegetarian meals before, but I also learned that one of the guests couldn’t eat onions. Since onions are such an integral part of most vegetable dishes, I was stumped for a while. Then I remembered when I once ate an unforgettable pasta mushroom dish in a great New York city Italian restaurant. I have wondered for years how I could duplicate it and decided to attempt it. This recipe comes close.

This will serve three people as a main dish, four or five as a side dish.

The most important thing to do in this recipe is to have all the ingredients measured and in front of you before you begin cooking. Also have a serving plate ready for the finished dish. You will be working very quickly.

Ingredients:

1 ½ pounds of mixed mushrooms such as Cremini or shitake (a variety of mushrooms adds depth of flavor to the sauce). Cut into about ¼ inch slices.

2 tablespoons of vegetable oil.

½ cup white wine.

1 tablespoon of finely minced garlic.

½ teaspoon dried thyme (or one teaspoon finely chopped fresh thyme).

1 cup fresh-grated Parmesan cheese.

3 tablespoons of butter.

2 tablespoons of flour.

½ cup cream.

Salt and pepper to taste.

Pasta water.

Enough pasta for three people (see package directions).

Directions:

Bring pasta water to a boil and add about one tablespoon of salt. This entire dish will only take about ten minutes to cook so everything needs to be ready. Look at the directions on the pasta package. If it says the pasta takes about ten minutes to cook, add the pasta to the boiling water as you prepare the sauce.

At medium-high heat, in a large frying pan, sauté one-half of the mushrooms with one tablespoon of oil. Cook until mushrooms are wilted and slightly golden. Remove from pan. Sauté the remaining mushrooms the same way. They are cooked in batches to prevent them from becoming mushy in the pan.

Return the previously cooked mushrooms back into the fry pan. Lower the heat to medium and add the minced garlic and the thyme. Stir until blended.

Add white wine and stir for one minute. Add butter. When it has melted, add the flour and stir until cooked through, another minute or so.

Add cream and half of the grated Parmesan cheese, stirring constantly. Turn heat to low. Taste for salt and pepper.

Add cooked pasta to pan and fold into mushroom sauce. If the sauce seems too thick, add a spoonful (or more) of the pasta water.

Turn out the pasta with the mushroom sauce onto a serving dish. Sprinkle with the remaining Parmesan cheese.

We served this with hot focaccia, a green salad and lots of wine. Bon appetit!

• Patty Schied is a longtime Juneau resident who studied at the Cordon Bleu in London and has written a cookbook. Cooking For Pleasure appears every other week in the Juneau Independent's features. She welcomes questions about her column at patschied@yahoo.com.

The finished pasta dish. (Photo by Patty Schied)