Astonishing Chorizo, Mushroom, Spinach Penne

Cooking Adventure Number #10 – Astonishing Chorizo, Mushroom, Spinach Penne

For my tenth main ingredient, my sister’s boyfriend selected ‘chorizo’. I researched and selected three recipes including Chorizo Pilaf, Chorizo + Mushroom + Spinach Penne and Spanish Chicken and Chorizo C. All recipes looked fantastic however I chose Chorizo + Mushroom + Spinach Penne because Casserole since it was cooking on Father’s Day, my dad really enjoys eating pasta dishes so this was my present to him. The ingredients for ‘Chorizo, Mushroom, Spinach Penne’ are:

Penne

Diced Tomatoes

Chorizo

Olive Oil

Garlic

Mushroom

Spinach

Pasta Sauce (no shown + optional)

 These are the ingredients for this recipe.

This recipe was very basic but it’s very heartfelt to me because it’s my dad’s present for Father Day so I have to make it to the best it can be. Before I started any main steps, I cooked the pasta because it’s one of the longest steps and if I finish everything on time, the pasta will be just cooked and warm. During the preparation photo, I boiled some water in the kettle so I don’t need to use lots of heat when it’s on the stove and it will take less time for the pasta to cook. Once I poured the water into a “pasta” saucepan, it didn’t take very long for the water to start bubbling.  

I think that I put too much water into the saucepan because whenever I put the heat onto high or medium, the water would rise and start bubbling out as this photo shows. That day, I also had to be a photographer while I was cooking because my cousin wasn’t here at that time.

I had to fry the chorizo which is a special type of sausage which has a very salty/spicy taste when eaten by itself. Usually you don’t eat it by itself but with other meals especially pasta dishes. I had to fry the chorizo for around two minutes. Within the two minutes, the smell from it was amazingly delicious, felt like I was working in an Italian restaurant!

After two minutes, I had to put in the chopped mushroom. The mushroom gave the chorizo sweetness so it’s not as salty as before. The juices from the chorizo started to separate from the chorizo and made an ‘oil seasoning’ for the mushrooms which made the kitchen smell absolutely divine!

Within ten minutes, the pasta had already been cooked. When I tried one penne, it was soft but some parts of it were still hard. I decided to transfer the pasta/water into another saucepan because the pasta was sticking to the saucepan because of its small size. It certainly made the pasta cooked more because now the pasta had free room to move around. Once the pasta had finished cooking, I poured the water and put the pasta into a bowl. My mum used a trick to make the pasta not stick together and give extra flavour which was mixing butter into the pasta. It gave a mouth-watering smell of butter which made my taste buds dance.

I placed the diced tomato into the chorizo/mushroom mixture. When I looked at the mixture, it was missing a major component which the recipe didn’t mention… PASTA SAUCE! Luckily, I found a 750ml bottle of pasta sauce which my sister who is currently overseas made with her fiancée for my mum. I poured the whole bottle in which now the mixture looked like a red pond with chorizo and mushroom. I had to wait for the mixture to thicken which took a long time but the smell was fantastic in the kitchen!

The mixture took almost forty-five minutes to thicken because the pasta sauce made the mixture extremely watery and made it take longer than the recipe says (the recipe said it should have taken 5 minutes but this was without the pasta sauce.) Once the mixture thickened, I placed the spinach in which gave out a really weird scent but the sauce made it smell like… tomatoes.

After one hour of cooking this recipe, I was extremely satisfied with the final product. The presentation of the pasta, sauce and spinach leaves looked so professional. As if I just inherited a famous artist’s designing skills! Since it was Father’s Day, I let my dad have the first taste. He was surprised that it tasted so amazing, he loved the chorizo and how the sauce made the chorizo less salty. Then it was my turn to taste my meal. It was extraordinary! The sauce was so rich in flavour, although it was still a bit watery, the chorizo was perfect in terms of flavour and the pasta was flavoursome although there was too much butter that it kind of overthrew the sauce’s sweet flavours. It was a great Father’s Day dinner and the food didn’t stop there; my cousin and I cooked lamb ribs and chicken/ beef sausages. Sadly my next recipe is going to be my last recipe for this project L but this recipe isn’t going to be a small, it’s going to be BIG!

This recipe was taken from TASTE.COM

Q: What type of sausage do you like?

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