Using up: mushrooms, cream

We popped into Bristol on Wednesday to buy my iPhone (bounce!), and found that the farmers’ market was on. Bristol is really badly served for food markets; this one is nice, but we work at home and so it’s not easy to pop into town during the week on a regular basis.  The freezers were full, and we were well stocked too, but we bought a couple of Pieminister pies, which we had for lunch when we got home, a couple of beautiful muffins (white choc and raspberry, and double choc chip), a bag of Worcester Pearmain apples, three varieties of sausage, a small punnet of local strawberries (hence the cream left over), and these lovely chestnut mushrooms.

So – a mushroom sauce.

Finely chopped two shallots and about five cloves of garlic.  Cut the mushrooms into chunks of about 1.5cm.  Put this lot in a pan with a BIG knob of butter and some olive oil.

Mushrooms are bastards – they slurp up all the oil and butter and you think everything’s going to burn and stick, and then all of a sudden they start exuding it all out again, so I cook them very slowly to confound them; these were done for probably 20 minutes.  At some point during this process I hurled in some chopped rosemary and sage from the garden.

Five minutes before the end, I put on some tagliagelle, and added a tiny splash of white wine – probably only a tablespoon, some double cream, and black pepper to the mushrooms.  Pete had parmesan on his, but I felt it didn’t need it.

We followed it up with the remains of a plum and pear crumble I made on Monday, and the very last of the cream.  All entirely gorgeous.