Goat Cheese Pasta with Spinach and Mushrooms

I'm on a mission to clear out the backlog, which is getting harder to do since I'm cooking every day. Sometimes twice a day. Plus some other un-named surprise projects that I'm working on…

Let's start with this guy:

ooo yeah! Goat cheese AND mushrooms?! Now you're talkin'

Recipe here

Pre-roasted mushrooms. I forgot to take an after picture. I forgot to take a lot of pictures, honestly. I'll give you a verbal description of the after part. They basically looked like I had sautéed them only with less juice coming out. So maybe we didn't really need a picture for that anyway.

Mom crumbled the goat cheese. One good thing about this house is we usually have a wide assortment of cheeses on hand. We didn't even need to buy the goat cheese for this because we already had some! Yesssss

As the internet says: wahlaaaa!

Then we argued over where the bowls were from and whether or not certain people were there when they were purchased. 

Please excuse the lack of pictures. I figured everyone knows what boiling pasta and chopped spinach looks like and I have yet to master the art of taking pictures of food on wood surfaces with spoons nearby and small bits of ingredients scattered near the bowl. Yes, it is an art and I have *clearly* not even begun to try to master it. Also, I just learned a lot of the food blog photographers take their food pictures with natural lighting in the daytime. I feel like that's cheating because who the heck eats dinner at 4pm in the winter when there's daylight.

Anyway, back to the recipe. I vote: pretty good. For me, the mushrooms were the best part of the whole thing. I would have eaten them by themselves. I thought there was entirely too much basil in this but Mom firmly and loudly disagreed. Basil has it's place, but I don't think it's in this dish. I was really surprised how much the reserved pasta water helped to make this super creamy. You probably don't need ALL of it as I found it created some runny goat cheese water at the bottom but if you plan to use this for leftovers it's probably not a bad idea. Since we were using leftover goat cheese, we only had about 4 oz instead of 6. It wasn't awful. I have only ever found it in 4oz or a giant log so don't be afraid to just use the 4oz log.

Stuck to the script: almost perfect except for the reduced amount of goat cheese. 98%