The Food Life

I tend to go grocery shopping at the worst possible time: when I’m hungry. I’ve gotten better at not grabbing every snack item on the shelf, especially since the more I cook, the more I avoid many of those tempting middle pre-processed snack foods aisles.

January 2009 cover

But one thing I can’t stop myself from doing is seeing those gorgeous snapshots of dinners-that-could-be staring back at me from the checkout stand. Cooking Light, bon appétit and others promise me delicious, fancy food, easy, sometimes affordably.

Well, last weekend I harkened the call yet again and picked up the January edition of bon appétit, mostly for the “Eat Better for Less” recipe suggestions.

Long story short(ened), I varied one of the recipes last night, my first attempt at a carbonara, which is a fairly simple dish that uses eggs and cheese as the basis for a pasta sauce and includes pancetta, a thinly sliced Italian bacon, and I really, really like bacon.

The bon appetit version of Fettuccine Carbonara with Fried Eggs was what was pictured on the cover, and the recipe as it originally stands looks delicious. But I had to very it for several reasons:

1) I could feel my arteries pre-emptively hardening at the thought of just one more egg in that dish

2) I didn’t have pancetta on hand and I was not about to go to the grocery store again this week

3) my local grocery store does not carry broccoli rabe, so plain old brocolli would have to do and

4) I had to use up some leftover pork tenderloin I’d made a couple days before

5) When it’s late and I’m hungry, I don’t really care if it’s a true carbonara

Here’s the result and slightly modified recipe:

Fettuccine Carbonara with Pork and Broccoli

Ingredients:

4 large eggs
2/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1/3 cup grated Pecorino Romano cheese
2 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
4 oz thinly sliced bacon, finely chopped
*1/4 pound precooked diced pork tenderloin (or any leftover pork chop or similar thing could do)
12 oz fettuccine noodles
1 bunch broccoli, stem diced, florets picked into pinky-tip-sixed pieces
*optional

Preparation:

Set a pot of water to boil for the noodles. Whisk together eggs, cheese, garlic and pepper in a medium bowl and set it aside.

Fry up bacon on medium heat in a skillet until it starts to crips and add diced pork into same pan. Finish cooking until bacon is crisp and pork is heated through. Remove with slotted spoon to paper towel-lined plate to soak up some of the grease.

Boil pasta, and halfway through cooking, add in broccoli. Cook until broccoli is bright green and crisp and pasta is tender. Drain, but reserve about a half cup of pasta water. Place pasta and broccoli back in pot, but do not return to hot burner. Immediately add egg-cheese mix, pork, 1/4 cup of pasta water and toss. Add a little bit more water as needed to moisten.

Results: It turned out pretty rich and tasty. I didn’t add much extra water, so it was thicker than I expected. I also mistakenly put the pot back on the stove burner after I’d dished it out and the leftovers have a touch of scrambled egg effect.

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Tags: bon appetit, pasta

This entry was posted on Friday, January 16th, 2009 at 2:05 pm and is filed under Entrees, Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.