My mother-in-law makes a terrific pasta dish with mushrooms and asparagus. Her version contains ham and is a bit more labor-intensive than this vegetarian variant I pulled together one night while trying to use up some asparagus I picked up at the farmer’s market.
Ingredients
1/2 box linguine
1/2 lb. mushrooms, sliced
1 bunch fresh asparagus, cut into bite-sized chunks
3 tbsp. olive oil
1/2 stick butter, cut into pats
1/4 c. heavy cream
Half a cup or so of grated Parmesan
Prepare linguine according to package instructions, drain and toss with butter to keep the noodles from sticking together. While pasta cooks, put asparagus and about a tablespoon of water in a casserole dish, cover and nuke for five minutes or so. Ideally, you’ll end up with asparagus that’s bright green, crisp-tender, and not shriveled up. If you don’t live on my in-laws’ farm, you’ll probably have to use some tired old asparagus that’s been sitting around the grocery store for a few days, as I obviously did — hence the slight shriveling you see in the picture. It still tastes OK, but the fresher asparagus is, the better.
Saute mushrooms in olive oil and toss pasta with mushrooms, asparagus, cream and Parmesan.
Makes four reasonable or two ginormous servings.
Emily
P.S.: Here are days 8 through 10 of my Lent project:



Sounds good! And just the sorts of ingredients I like (asparagus, pasta, mushrooms!). Just have to use gluten-free pasta. . . . and maybe fry up some Italian sausage to add to it. I have saved the recipe to my bookmark folder. Thank you!
Honestly, you could probably skip the pasta altogether and just add some crushed garlic to the mushrooms to kick up the flavor a bit. ‘Twould go well with mashed potatoes or pureed cauliflower.
The cauliflower and garlic sound really good. The Italian sausage is pretty spicy (incl. garlic), so I might cut back a bit on that. 😀
this looks too good….. now I am hungry