Creamy Mushroom Sauce over Pasta (Pressure Cooker Style)

In recent weeks, I've been cooking up a storm with my pressure cooker, especially on work nights. Before you non pressure cooker owners decide to abandon reading this post, hold on! You can always make this recipe on the stovetop. It'll just take a bit longer.  (Pressure cooker usually decreases conventional cooking time by at least 50%-- and sometimes 75%).  Homemade rice pudding in 16 minute? Incredible!

While my family (self-included) appreciates a  good cut of steak,  I do like to prepare meatless dinners.   I guess you could call me a "flexitarian".

I downloaded America's Test Kitchen's book, "Pressure Cooker Perfection", and then forgot about it-- for several months.  Recently, I began to read it from cover to cover. It's a good book, with basic information on pressure cooking  from the science behind it, to choosing which pressure cooker is best.

I'm a big fan of ATK's recipes, and have posted quite a few them. I bookmarked a few recipes, from this book, which I'll be sharing with you over the next couple of weeks.  This recipe caught my eye, because I love mushrooms-- while my husband is indifferent about them. 

He has said that he does like shiitake mushrooms, so when I saw this recipe had a blend of shiitake, cremini and portobello mushrooms-- well, that settled it.  I had to make this.


We begin by cooking onions until softened, then adding thyme, garlic, flour. Pretty basic, right? Next, we add chicken broth (vegetable broth could be substituted to make this truly vegetarian) and sherry.

We add in the mushrooms, and give it all a good stir. Lock on the lid, and pressure cook for 25 minutes. That gives me time to start the pasta to cooking, and to tidy up the kitchen.

NOTE:  I would guess that if one doesn't have a pressure cooker, you would have to cook the mushrooms first, and then add it to this sauce. Why? Because the pressure cooker will draw out the moisture of the mushrooms which will then develop the sauce even more.  That's the beauty of a pressure cooker.

After doing a quick-release of pressure, I carefully remove the lid.  I add some heavy cream, give it a good stir and bring it to a simmer for about 5 minutes, so the sauce can thicken.  Smells great!

 With the heat turned off, grated Parmesan cheese and freshly chopped parsley is added.

The sauce was bubbly hot, as I poured it over cooked pasta. Dinner is ready!

 

TASTING NOTES:  I liked that this dinner didn't take a lot of prep work to pull together.  To be honest, I found the mushrooms already sliced! That saved a lot of time.  My husband really liked this dish, and I believe him, because he went back for seconds. This makes a LOT of servings-- I'd say about 8 servings. The next day, I thought this reheated very well for lunch.

It's a welcome break to eat meatless dinners, and this one will definitely become a part of that rotation.

I keep touting the virtues of pressure cooking, yet I still hear all the horror stories and fears about this fun way to make soups, stews, beans and roasts.  I hope that I can convert more skeptics into digging out their pressure cooker.  Or, buy one. You won't regret it.  I'm on a roll!  I've got a few more pressure cooker recipes to go.  Now that we are finally getting some rain (but not enough to end California's drought), I'm all about dinners like this.

Before we know it, Weber grilling season will be back!

I always post a printable recipe card at the end of each recipe post. If you cannot view it, you might be using an older version of Internet Explorer. You should be able to view my recipe cards with Safari, Mozilla, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer. If you still can't view the recipe card, all of my recipes are stored on Key Ingredient, by clicking here. If you still can't figure out how to view the printable recipe card, please email me at foodiewife@gmail.com and I am happy to help.