Wild Mushroom Pasta Sauce

Kind of an unusual pasta dish -- somehow more French than Italian. The sauce is basically a mix of dried and fresh mushrooms, with shallots, garlic, parsley and madeira. There is no cheese at all, and if you use all EVOO rather than a blend of EVOO and butter as the recipe directs, it's a good pasta dish for vegans.

The sauce is tossed with angel hair (I used thin spaghetti since that's what I had). There's a nice combination of earthiness and sophistication in the flavors here. All that mushroom slicing (1.5 lbs) can be a little time consuming (although I found it a nice and restful change of pace from the work I had been doing), but if you buy pre-sliced mushrooms, it's about a 30 minute meal.

I did finish the dish with an additional pat of butter to add some silkiness to the sauce and had no regrets.