Last week, I made a "pasta" carbonara that, while tasty, was a bit of a disaster because I didn't quite get the pasta right. That's why I refer to it as a pasta carbonara -- the pasta just wasn't clearly identifiable as being fettucini, spaghetti, or anything else.
Last night, I decided to try another carbonara sauce that is even easier than the one I did last week. To make sure my attention was squarely on the sauce, I decided to just use dry fettucini because really, it's hard to screw that up (though it's been known to happen).
This recipe comes from Donna Hay. I used one of her recipes last week (the butternut squash risotto) and I really love her stuff. The only trick to following her recipes is to be able to convert units. You see, she's Australian and although certain words she uses can be charming, it can be trickly to know exactly how much she wants of an ingredient when she's calling for 400 grams of it. Fortunately, my cell phone has a unit converter on it so I have started to just write in the conversions in the cookbook.
The recipe for last night is extraordinarily straight forward. First, you whisk together 4 egg yolks, a cup of cream, a half of cup of fresh parm, and a little salt and pepper:
After you've created what will be the sauce, I cooked some bacon I had cut into strips (to make the cooking go faster) with some green onions in a pan. This only takes a few minutes to cook and will serve as the topping to the pasta:
If you're good at timing, you can have the pasta going while the bacon is cooking so that things are ready about the same time. I actually waited for the bacon to almost be done before starting on the pasta. The reason I waited to cook the pasta last (unlike Donna Hay, who cooked it first) is that the heat of the pasta itself is what is supposed to cook the egg in this particular carbonara sauce. Because of that, I thought I'd cook the pasta last, drain it, and immediately toss it with the sauce. It seemed to work well as the sauce quickly took on its proper appearance. Once I tossed the pasta with the sauce, I plated it, put the bacon and green onions on top, and voila:
This was served with a side salad. Unfortunately, you can't really see the sauce in this particular picture because I used a whole wheat fettucini. You'll just have to take my word that it was delicious.
