By Weston Kelly
My favorite meal on a cold winter night is a creamy mushroom pasta dish that requires little effort. Scouring through Cooking Light and Cook’s Illustrated, I’ve found many recipes that fit the description but just aren’t quite right. However, after long hours flipping through magazine after magazine, I stumbled across the perfect recipe from Cooking Light’s December 2007 issue: “Farfalle with Creamy Wild Mushroom Sauce.” Cooked with a couple of modifications, this dish will have you scraping your plate and dashing for seconds. While the recipe calls for a wild mushroom blend, we usually use a combination of brown beech, shiitake, and cremini—roughly chopped and left thick. The exact proportions are merely suggestions, and we always add extra mushrooms for more umami flavor. As for the dry white wine, we didn’t have enough last time and instead opted for a sauvignon blanc. The rest of the recipe and directions are in the image below, and I would highly recommend giving this dish a try. Adding some salt and garlic once plated results in an otherworldly savory sensation, sure to delight your taste buds.
