Vegan pumpkin pasta sauce with wild mushrooms is an easy and healthy recipe filled with the flavours of autumn. An easy 4-ingredient pumpkin sauce tossed with pasta and topped with sautéed mushrooms, garlic and herbs will give you a filling and delicious 30-minute dinner for a chilly fall evening.

Fall is finally here and it’s been raining for what seems like weeks. Luckily with rain come wild mushrooms and wild mushrooms are very, very popular in Barcelona.

I often complain about the lack of basic produce in supermarkets here (green onions? fresh peas?), but wild mushrooms are one rare gem that appear in virtually every supermarket for an all-too-brief period of time in the fall.

On Tuesday and Friday evenings I attend a dance class and leave my husband in charge of dinner. He’s been complaining more and more about it as his repertoire of vegan dishes is somewhat limited.

Last Tuesday, however, he was quite proud of himself for preparing a quick sauté of camagrocs and young garlic shoots. He seemed super excited that it’s wild mushroom season (and that he can add one more dish to his vegan recipe repertoire for the next few months).

So a couple days later we headed down the street to our local veggie store and picked up four varieties of local wild mushrooms: camagroc , rossinyol , rovelló and fredolic (I was only intending to get two varieties for this recipe but he got so excited in the store and insisted we try some of each).

At the same store I also managed to get my hands on this huge-ass pumpkin. Contrary to wild mushrooms, pumpkins are not so easy to find in Barcelona (and canned pumpkin doesn’t exist). Butternut squash are everywhere but a real fat, round pumpkin usually requires a special trip to the market with someone strong to carry it home for you since parking at a market is impossible.

This pumpkin weighed more than seven kilos and cost more than ten euros. I foolishly handed it over to my husband to carry home, who delighted himself the whole way by repeatedly raising it over his head and asking “do you like Smashing Pumpkins?”

Luckily the pumpkin made it home in one piece and I’ve now got my entire winter’s supply of pumpkin for all the pumpkin spice lattes, pies and pumpkin curries my heart desires.

So this recipe for vegan pumpkin pasta sauce with wild mushrooms is the result of this week’s produce adventures. This recipe can, of course, be made with any variety of mushroom, wild or cultivated. Choose the varieties that you like and have available to you. And of course you don’t need to use fresh pumpkin either – canned will work just as well.