Pasta Carbonara (by G)

Being Monday I wanted to make something a bit easy for dinner - with only a handful of ingredients pasta carbonara is one of the easiest meals ever.

I've made it before a few times, always with cream but I believe an authentic carbonara doesn't have cream so I decided to try that out.

I fried a little bit of bacon (I thought I should use it because, unlikely as it may seem, it has been in our freezer for weeks) and a couple of garlic cloves in oil then added some butter and discarded the garlic. I have never discarded garlic before - it was hard to resist the temptation to mince it and leave it in the dish to provide a garlic hit but I guess the point is that you want a hint of garlic - it's not spaghetti al garlic.

Next I added the pasta to the bacon and oil and then poured in a mix of eggs and parmesan (I had cream in the fridge and was tempted to add that but resisted).  I carefully mixed the pasta through the egg and cheese mix then added a bit of pasta water to loosen the sauce. It is hard to resist the temptation to put the pasta back on the heat and scramble the eggs to make sure they are cooked (I've done that just about every other time I've made carbonara). All I can say is that if you resist the temptation the result will be 10 times better.

To finish I topped the plated pasta with a little more parmesan as well as some salt and cracked black pepper. Amazing.  All I can say is that I've discovered the key to a really good carbonara - keep it simple and resist the temptation to fuck it up by adding a bunch of things that are not needed.