Welcome to my very own blog, and welcome to it’s first recipe.
Anyone who knows me knows that I love a good cream sauce, and since I had time today to make some fresh pasta, what better sauce to go with it then a cream sauce. I will do a separate entry on making pasta, because I didn’t take any photos of it today, but it’s really easy with a hand-wound pasta machine.
Making pasta in this way is really quick, and only takes a couple of minutes to cook.
For the sauce I used:
One medium brown onion, finely chopped
4 large mushrooms, sliced
300mL cream
About half a cup of white wine
Cracked pepper to taste
And:
Delicious locally grown baby spinach. These leaves are grown about half an hour north-east of Hobart’s city centre and are really fresh. You’ll need a few good handfuls as it seems to just melt into your cooking.
For cream sauces, I like to use butter to cook with rather then olive oil, as it compliments the other flavours and helps the sauce to thicken later.
Lightly brown the onion. Add mushrooms and wine, and, keeping the heat on, reduce the volume of the wine by about two thirds.
At this point I put my pot of salted water on to boil, but if you were using regular dried pasta you would have to put the pasta on to cook before you start cooking the sauce.
Time to add the cream. Down here in Australia you can buy little cartons of longlife cream, I always make sure I have a stash in the fridge or cupboard as they are also great for whipping to use in any dessert.
So, stir in the cream and cracked pepper (I actually add so much pepper to my sauce I grind it up in advance!) and salt to taste. Leave to simmer stirring occasionally while your pot of water starts to boil. Time to set up your bowls and cutlery, because once the pasta starts cooking you won’t have long to go. If using fresh pasta, tease it out a little before adding it to the boiling water, and add a little butter or olive oil to stop it from sticking together. I cooked my pasta for 2 minutes (after the water returned to the boil) and it was perfect.
This 2 minutes is also the perfect amount of time needed to wilt the baby spinach leaves in your sauce. Add a handful at a time and fold into the sauce, it only needs minimal cooking. Drain your pasta and return it to the pot, and tip your sauce into the pasta, and mix with a spaghetti server. Serve and enjoy!
Tags: Baby Spinach, Cream, Dinner, Pasta, Sauce
September 26, 2008 at 10:24 am |
So many cream sauces are ruined by oversaucing the pasta, this however is perfect. Yum!
October 23, 2008 at 3:29 am |
Wow. This looks really good. I’m going to try it later this month, whenever I empty my fridge and I’ve always wanted to cook pasta with fresh pasta.
June 10, 2009 at 1:35 am |
I am looking to make my own spinach fettuccini pasta, but I cannot find a receipe for this. do you know of any place I can find one?
June 10, 2009 at 10:49 am |
Do you mean you want to make the pasta itself (as opposed to the sauce)? You can put just about anything in your pasta dough! The ratio for pasta is 1/2 cup of flour for every egg, plus a pinch of salt. So you can throw pretty much anything in: tomato paste, minced spinach, squid ink, chili, just be aware that because of the moisture in your extra ingredient (especially the spinach) you might need to add a little more flour to compensate. Then just make the pasta as normal
Does this help?
April 17, 2011 at 2:42 pm |
I entred a search for fettuccini with creamy spinach and mushroom sauce and this is where it took me! A fabulously simple and tasty dish, I will make this again and recommend it to friends!! Thanks for posting this…
April 17, 2011 at 10:34 pm |
Thanks Phyllis
March 14, 2012 at 7:44 pm |
food…
[...]Homemade fettuccini in mushroom baby spinach and cream sauce « Lauren’s Cooking and Gardening Journal[...]…