Mushroom pesto ravioli with sage butter sauce – these delicate parcels, stuffed with the most delicious mushroom filling, coated in rich, velvety, sage butter sauce, showered with cheese and served with a glass of Cabernet, are truly outstanding, and deserve a spotlight on your table this fall.

Dark days and cold nights call for cozy meals and good red wines (old proverb) 😉

I hope you’ll find today’s recipe the perfect antidote to the chill in the air, and the gloom in the sky.

These mushroom pesto ravioli with sage butter sauce taste like an Autumn forest after rain – earthy, dank, and whimsical, dark and mysterious, yet totally refreshing, and satisfying. The woodsy aroma of mushrooms, the earthy flavor of toasted walnuts, mixed into a pesto like sauce, perfumed with sage, thyme, and truffle oil for even more depth of flavor, then enveloped in thin sheets of pasta, and served with butter sage cream sauce. I say, cheers to that!

While homemade pasta is unmatched in flavor to store-bought, I’m cheating a bit in this recipe, and using won ton wrappers instead. Three reasons for that: 1) I still don’t possess a pasta machine 2) It makes for a much faster meal prep. 3) I’ve always been all about the filling, rather than the canvas, and I think in this recipe, the mushroom pesto really outshines the pasta.

Won ton wrappers are quite versatile – they are thin, and pliable, and similar in ingredients to pasta, so they serve as an excellent substitute.

But the real hero here is the mushroom pesto. It’s a mixture of cooked mushrooms, enhanced in flavor with a bunch of umami-tasting ingredients like cheese, walnuts, garlic, and truffle oil, and perfumed with thyme and sage. Its deep, earthy flavor feels almost shockingly rich by itself, but when parceled out in small portions between thin pasta sheets, it mellows out to a pleasant, buttery-mushroom-y flavor. The mushroom pesto is also quite versatile. The recipe will make a little more than you need for the ravioli, so here are some ideas about what to use the leftover mushroom pesto for:

add it to other cooked pasta

mix it in with scrambled eggs and cheese, or fold into omelette

spread it on toasted garlicky bread and serve Bruschetta-style

make potato croquettes stuffed with this mushroom pesto

I happened to have truffle salt and truffle oil on hand, so I used them for the pesto, to give it that extra oomph, but even if you don’t have these, it will still have a very rich flavor.

Don’t forget to pair these ravioli with an equally rich, deep-flavored Cabernet.

Other mushroom dishes to try:

Mushroom salad with lentils and caramelized onions

Stuffed mushrooms in creamy pesto sauce

Caramelized onions, lentils and mushroom soup

Creamy mushroom and leeks quinoa risotto