Adventures in Italian Cooking

[webcowgirl]

So ... with all of these trips to Italy, I've been cooking a lot more food from the region, thanks in part to some good cookbooks I've picked up. And along the way I've acquired some ideas about certain pastas liking to be served in certain ways. Trofie, for exampple (little strings with a knot tied in them is what they look like more or less), wants to be served with pesto and green beans. I don't know why, that's just the way I got it twice (Genoa and Milan), so that's how I think it needs to be served.

And bucatini, a hollow pasta. I think it wants to be served with Trapanese pesto, a mix of raw tomatoes and almonds. So I bought some, "fusilli lunghi bucatini," big curly hollow spaghettis, especially for this recipe, and, as they say, it was good.

However, there was some leftover in the bag, only enough for one serving, and not worth the effort of peeling tomatoes and using the mortar and pestle on the almonds, so I decided to try them in a carbonara sauce (as it's a cool day and it sounded good and I had all of the ingredients). (Note this pasta isn't very common so holding out until the next bag was bought seemed like not the best option.)

BIG MISTAKE. The insides of the pasta appear to have retained way more water than I expected and my lunch was a bit of a goopy mess. This could also have been my fault for having used 2 T of milk instead of cream (didn't have cream), but the thinness all seemed to be due to water. To which I say, yuck! Except, well, it was still pretty edible. Still, notes for the future: bucatini is not a joyous marriage with a carbonara sauce.

Comments

[wendolen.livejournal.com]

I grew up on the 60's Fannie Farmer carbonara recipe, which isn't sauced, exactly: It's got diced bacon, an egg, butter, and cheese. And it's basically the most perfect comfort food in the world, to me. (Also, if you cook the bacon in the oven, you wind up with a sheet of drippings that's awesome for subsequently roasting tasty brassicas in.)

Anyway, I say this to provide context for telling you about how some stores around here have recently been carrying Barilla's spaghetti rigate, which is a joyous marriage with this drier form of carbonara. (Hmm, I should make some. Maybe tonight!)

[webcowgirl.livejournal.com]

You'd think after all of this time I'd have the carbonara recipe down. Maybe I could blame it on the UK bacon - I wound up using back bacon, as that was what I had on hand (rather than streaky AKA US style bacon - back bacon is mostly meat & very little fat) and it was just a horrid failure.