So tonight for dinner I made this wonderful dish but added some wild mushrooms, shaggy manes. I worked out the highway on recovery today and on the way back we stopped to see if the shaggy manes were growing in the shaggy mane spot. They were! So we all picked a bunch, I may have picked a few too many for just Jeremy and I but I just couldn't help it, they were every where. We also stopped at a spot where some Chicken of the Woods was growing. I've never tried it so I took a little and am planning on cooking it up tomorrow.
Shaggy manes are a tall shaggy looking mushroom, but they also go bad very quickly. When picking them you want to go for the ones on the smaller side and try to find them before their gills have started to turn black. I picked a couple that were just starting and by the time I got them home and was ready to cook with them they were much blacker than I remember. They turn so quickly.
A really good way to cook wild mushrooms is to dry saute them. I learned this from an old boss who liked to pick mushrooms. So because the mushrooms have so much water content you don't need to saute them up in anything. You just cut them up and pop them in a pan at medium heat. I had a lot of mushrooms so it took a while for the water to cook off. Then once the water has cooked off and the mushrooms are JUST starting to stick to the pan you drizzle them with olive oil and salt and pepper to taste. They turn out great every time. So this is what I did with the mushrooms and made my one pot pasta into a one pot plus one pan pasta.
For the pasta you take a box of pasta and add it to boiling water. Take six minutes off the cook time and let it boil for that long. When there are only 6 minutes left you add a head of chopped up broccoli to the boiling water and boil for the remaining 6 minutes. Then drain, add 6 Tbsp of olive oil and 5 clovers of minced garlic and mix it all up. After this step is when I added in my mushrooms, then topped it with a little Parmesan cheese.
It was so tasty. And fun to add a new ingredient to a pasta that we both really love. It would've been a lot of fun to use broccoli from the garden but my broccoli is only producing little tiny sprigs now. The big heads have come and gone.
INGREDIENTS
1 box pasta
1 head broccoli
6 Tbsp olive oil
5 cloves garlic
salt and pepper to taste
Parmesan cheese to top
Mushrooms or any other fun ingredient, if you want a little extra.
Enjoy!
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The mushrooms after they got home
Dry sauteing the mushrooms
Mixing the olive oil and garlic in with the pasta and broccoli
Finished product!
