Bacon and Eggs with Pasta! Whatsamatterforyou?

Have you ever come home after a long day, and had no plan for dinner? Were you stuck thinking, “Shit! I am in trouble!”

Fear not, gentle readers! The ingredients are all there in your pantry/fridge.

Who doesn’t have bacon? (You there! Yah you – the vegan! hit the bricks! Har Har!), you all have Parmesan, right? I am sure you have eggs as well. Garlic? Tell me you have some wine? Finally, you should have pasta somewhere in that cupboard of yours.

So, fry up your bacon, set up a pot of pasta water. (5 liters = 2 tbsp of kosher salt.) While your bacon is cooking, cook off your pasta.

Remove your bacon and add in your chopped garlic. (Do not take the bacon fat out of the pan! Seriously!) Deglaze with white wine, (have a glass as well, if you have it.)

Add your cooked pasta to the pan, sprinkle in your shredded parmesan. Finally, whip up a couple or three eggs and fold them into the pasta.

What you are left with is a creamy pasta dish, with the hot pasta cooking the egg as you toss it in the pan.

I am sure there are those of you out there that are freaking over the pork fat. Get over it folks! Sure, if you eat this EVERY day (mmm pork!) for breakfast, lunch and dinner – you might gain weight from all that pasta you are eating. Leave the bacon fat alone, it didn’t do anything to you!

I mean, it is not like I am trying to get onto this site. Some of you want to go and report me, fine, I’ll take my chances!

Seriously folks, it is okay to leave it in. What happens is the pasta’s water releases into the pan and creates a sauce around everything. As a last touch, top with extra Parmesan before serving. You will not be sorry you did.

Here is the recipe for those of you who like following that sort of thing:

Pasta Carbonara

Serves 2 1/2 (My kid only eats like a half portion, so there you are!)

Ingredients:

• 5 liters (5 quarts) water
• 2 tablespoons kosher salt
• 500 grams (1 pound) pasta of your choice (I used Penne)
• 250 grams (1/2 pound) bacon
• 1 clove garlic
• 200 mL (under a cu p)white wine (+200 mL for my glass!)
• 200 grams Parmesan cheese
• 3 eggs

Method:

1. Bring water to boil; add salt
2. Meanwhile, render bacon until crisp; remove from pan, cut and reserve.
3. Sweat garlic in bacon fat; deglaze with white wine.
4. Add cooked pasta to pan; toss with half of Parmesan cheese.
5. Add bacon back to the pan, and toss with 3 eggs. The resulting mixture will look creamy.
6. Plate the pasta, and top with remaining Parmesan cheese.
7. Serve immediately.

My kid enjoyed the dish, and it went over well with the missus. Score one for WDC!

One of my favorite food is pasta. I could eat pasta for every meal and not blink. I actually did just that when I worked at a restaurant called Wienstein and Gavinos. Of course, I gained a few pounds from that job!

The following recipe is nothing complicated. If you cannot get ground veal where you are at, no worries, just sub in ground beef. Try to use beef chuck and pork shoulder for this recipe.

Photo by sabotrax of Flickr fame

Meat Sauce

Yeilds 4 L sauce

Ingredients:

• 60 mL (1/4 cup) extra-virgin olive oil
• 1 onion, peeled, chopped fine
• 1 carrot, peeled, chopped fine
• 1 rib celery, chopped fine
• 1 Kg (2 lbs) lean ground beef
• 500 g (1 lb) lean ground pork
• 500 g (1 lb) lean ground veal
• 5 cloves garlic, peeled, minced
• 250 mL (1 cup) milk
• 224 mL (8 oz can) tomato paste
• 3 x 828 mL (3 x 28 oz cans) diced tomatoes
• handful dried oregano
• handful dried thyme
• handful dried basil
• To taste salt
• To taste pepper

Method:

1. Sweat onion, carrot and celery in olive oil over medium heat until soft.
2. Add ground meats and cook until browned slightly.
3. Add garlic, cook for one minute to soften flavor.
4. Add tomato paste with two cans of the diced tomatoes. (Reserve one for later.)
5. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, simmer for one hour.
6. Blend mixture with a hand bender to coarsly chop up the bigger chunks of meat.
7. Add remaining can of diced tomatoes, oregano, thyme and basil.
8. Simmer for 30 minutes.
9. Adjust seasoning with salt and pepper.

As you can see, this will make a lot. The trick here is to remember that this will take a while. Slow food, if you will. The good news is that this will make a lot of sauce, so you can freeze it into portions.

You may have noticed that there are some things missing from this sauce as compared to others, and one strange ingredient: milk!

Milk will help to tenderize the meat as it cooks, giving you a silky, smooth sauce. It will also help with the mouth-feel of the final sauce.

Do not put sugar in your sauce. I counter the acidity of the tomatoes with the carrots and the slow simmering of the sauce. This is natural cooking, and I hate it when meat sauce tastes like candy.

Bacon, mushrooms and the like? They are fine to add to a pasta dish before you add the meat sauce. There is no reason for them to be in the base sauce, and they will not freeze well. You want something as a base for adding later, and the point of adding pancetta or mushrooms is to have the flavor. Freezers are notorious for destroying subtle flavors, so get the most out of your expensive ingredients, add them jsut before you heat up the sauce.

This is also the reason you do not see any fresh herbs in my sauce. The fresh herbs go in at the END of cooking, or their flavor is lost. This means that I will heat my garlic, add my sauce, then toss it into the pasta. Toss with parmesan, then the fresh herbs. After a few seconds, the oils in the herbs release their flavors, then it is time to serve.