You can’t really go wrong with pasta, can you. It’s the one food I’ve been cooking predominantly for as long as I’ve lived alone. Before I stopped skipping meals and started cooking with vegetables, I used to eat it at least twice a week. It’s fast, it’s easy and you can place almost anything with it.
Bacon – my new favorite ingredient for… Everything!
In the book I’ve been using from BBC Good Foods, I found an exciting recipe for spaghetti that included bacon, of all possible ingredients! I thought I’d already written about this meal (hence the delay) so I’ve already managed to enjoy it twice before sitting down to write here.
First up, here is the recipe I used.
One carrot, a celery stick and the instructions were to chop them, which I assumed meant cutting them up in to small squares (I still haven’t yet confirmed this with YouTube but it tasted fine). I had no idea what bacon ‘lardons’ were and I couldn’t see them clearly labelled on any of the shelves in the supermarket so, I just bought a pack of rashers. After consulting Google Images, I learned that they’re just tiny squares of bacon. I had a knife that would make it happen and chopped two rashers in all. I wonder whether it’s cheaper to do it this way?
While this was going on, my pasta was boiling on the hob.
I them became aware of my limitations in owning a single hob, as I also needed to cook the other ingredients in this way. I’ve managed to successfully ‘juggle’ saucepans like this in the past but only with simple sauces that require a few minutes of gentle heat, not ten of them. You also have to consider the temperature change.
I’ve noticed that Andrew James produce a double induction hob but I’m not about to rush out and buy one for this single meal. Even though my single induction hob seems to have developed an irritating squeak… This seems to happen when it’s reached peak temperature on a low setting.
Could I have softened the celery, carrot and bacon in the oven?
My entertaining act on the first attempt resulted in a large quantity of the spaghetti bonding itself to the base of the large saucepan. On the smaller pan, I even managed to create a distinguished burn mark, where I must’ve lingered for two long.
As a meal, it was delicious. For a single person though, I’d cooked an extremely ‘generous’ portion of pasta! I even tried to ‘re-estimate’ on my second attempt a few days ago but I still ended up with a complete bowl-full! A sundried tomato pasta was stirred through the ingredients before serving with the spaghetti. I was looking for a red jar of pesto, which I’ve bought and liked before, but I couldn’t spot it on the shelves, which I assume means they’ve altered the packaging. I don’t think it took anything away from the meal.
Thanks for reading. More food news coming soon!
