It’s our monthly pub visit this weekend. This month we’re off to check out our local community-run pub The Ivy House. As we plan on drinking for more than a couple of hours without falling over we need something to line our stomachs!

We’ve got the focaccia bread I’m making for Sourdough Surprise this month, so I thought I’d do a quick pasta dish to go with it. We’ve got some artisan dried sausage in the fridge left over from Christmas that I got from Borough Market, so I’m going to do a creamy sausage and mushroom sauce with it, topped with gratings of Belper Knolle cheese which is also leftover from Christmas, and also from Borough Market.

For the creamy sauce I’m using half fat creme fraiche, rather than real cream, in a damage limitation exercise… which isn’t going to have much of an impact given the bread and beer we’re also having!

While the pasta boiled away we fried up the sausage, added garlic to the fat it produced, then added mushrooms to soak up that fat, then tossed in spinach (another minor attempt to make this healthy…), added the pasta then creme fraiche and a splash of lemon juice, and served with the focaccia.

Wow! This really worked. I guess it helped starting with such good ingredients, but I’m really happy with the way the flavours worked together.