Chicken, Mushroom and Red Wine Sauce
A relatively quick and easy sauce for pasta, this improves - like many tomato-based sauces - with longer slower cooking or a "resting period" in between cooking, then heating up and eating when pasta is perfectly al dente. It warms up well next day for leftovers, too.
This goes particularly well with "short" pasta shapes, eg fusili (apirals) or penne (short tubes), but is equally good with spaghettini etc.
Serves 2 - 4.
Ingredients:
|
4 cloves of garlic, peeled and finely minced |
2 boneless and skinless chicken breast fillets, sliced very finely |
|
8 medium button mushrooms, sliced |
1 x 400 g tin Italian peeled tomatoes |
|
1 wineglass red wine |
1 wineglass strong chicken stock |
|
2 tspns dried parsley |
1 tspn dried basil |
|
1 tspn dried oregano |
salt, pepper |
|
bunch fresh parsley, finely chopped, additional |
extra virgin olive oil, additional |
Method:
Heat a couple of tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil in a *preferably stainless steel) frying pan to a medium temperature. Add chicken shreds and cook, tossing occasionally until they turn white with a few flecks of golden-brown. Add minced garlic and stir through, for about 5 minutes.
Add tomatoes with juice, and crush tomatoes to pulp, combining well with the chicken and garlic. Add mushrooms, red wine, stock, dried herbs and a few grinds each of salt and pepper and mix together well.
Cook on a medium simmer for about half an hour. Check seasoning, add fresh parsley (or another 2 tspn of dried parsley if no fresh stuff is available), and pour over a dribble of extra virgin olive oil before adding sauce to saucepan of cooked and drained pasta and mixing through (the sauce really gets a chance to "soak in" to sauce and develop/intensify flavours).
Serve in wide shallow pasta bowls. No cheese with this one! (in fact, that tastes seriously icky.)