Pinterest Project - Vol 1 - ay jay kay squared.

So, as many of you are likely on (or at least familiar with) Pinterest, I thought I’d occasionally post my attempts at some of the projects and meals that I’ve found on there. Usually it’s about food. I’m not as DIYourselfy as I’d like to be, so other projects will be few and far between.

You can find me and my pins on www.pinterest.com/ajkorvemaker

This time around I made Sundried Tomato and Mushroom Pasta with Basil-Garlic Sauce.

Perhaps I should paraphrase everything by saying that I don’t usually follow everything to the ‘T’ in recipes.

That being said, I think the picture shows a sauce that is much thicker than the original would have been. Anyway, onto the review:

I altered. We didn’t have everything in the amounts called for.

6oz mushrooms instead of 8

0.4oz sundried tomatoes instead of 3.5

1 cup of milk instead of 1/2 cup of half-and-half and 1/2 cup of ‘heavy’ cream

plus the addition of 2 roma tomatoes to make up for the sundried loss.

Other than that we stuck the the same general formula until the end.

The whipping cream (‘heavy’ cream) would have definitely thickened the sauce up a lot more than just milk (we used whole milk), but I don’t think it would have done enough to warrant the nice stickiness in the picture above. I used about 2 tbsp of cornstarch at the end in a last effort to thicken up the sauce (which was extremely watery, despite being reduced for about 30 minutes). At least in my alterations, if I had wanted to avoid using a thickener, I would (should) have reduced the amount of water in half or less, and simmered the whole thing about 30 minutes (stirring mucho, as milk will scald on the bottom). But it did taste great. The method they use with the creams and reduction is similar to how I was taught to make authentic fettucini alfredo. In fact, now that I think about it, they seemed to mostly add mushrooms and tomatoes to the recipe I have for fettucini alfredo. How about that. In which case, I still stand my my observation about cutting the water (if use at all) and reducing.

I’m not a fan of adding dried herbs at the end of cooking – I feel that they don’t mix as well into the creation and their flavour seems a little separated from the rest. Next time I’d likely drop the basil in with the saute-ing stage. Please note, 1 tbsp of dried basil is a good amount for the whole recipe, it’s not too much (as I initially thought it might be). Even with it not melding as well as I’d hoped it might, it still went very well with everything.

Please note in the pictures that it looks like some weird glutenous blob because I chose to use cornstarch as a thickener. It wouldn’t looks so terrible, I think, if it had naturally been thicker. One way or another – it’s a good recipe and I’d make it again. My kids both ate it happily which is the major test in this kitchen!