Roasted Tomato & Wine Cap Mushroom Pasta

This is a polyculture patch to PLATE dish if ever there was one!! Wine Cap mushrooms are growing in the straw mulching the tomato bed = a polyculture, which is a mixture of different plants growing together that benefit each other –  in this case, fungi— wine cap mushrooms’ superpower is to enhance soil nutrients.

It is true – I am as much a plant-garden-nerd as a food nerd & this bed set my pulse racing as I wandered into Meeting House Farm biodynamic garden one morning to discover this flush. We picked 7 lbs | 3 kg of mushrooms to eat and 3 x as many to be mixed with compost for a new garden bed – this was just one flush we could see that there was more soon to bloom. 

These mushrooms were so abundant and beautiful that it felt like a privilege for farmer Emily & I to bear witness to and harvest. 

From polyculture bed to kitchen bench, I created this luscious and straightforward dish for our lunch; the oven does most of the work for you. You can use any mushrooms you like – portobellos would be the closest store-bought version of a wine cap.