Cheap and Good Pasta

I came across this on allrecipes.com and apparently this is the second version
of the “Spaghetti Carbonara.” I wonder what makes it better than the first?

This recipe uses bacon (sweet, sweet bacon…cue Homer Simpson noise). Kristen doesn’t normally eat bacon, but I’m going to try and sneak it by her. The bacon is what got my attention in this recipe, the eggs threw me off, and I’ve been sitting on this particular recipe for a month wondering how it can be any good. Stirring scrambled eggs into hot pasta doesn’t equal sauce in my mind — it brings up images of weird lo mein or a breakfast gone wrong — but I will make it and try to sneak bacon into Kristen’s diet.

Thursday night: Carbonara night. I stopped at the liquor store and got my dry white wine (Sauvigon blanc) and headed to the grocery store for the bacon. Why New York won’t let me do that all in one step, I have no idea. The first snag I hit was that we had no spaghetti noodles in the house. We had cavatappi and elbow noodles but that was all, so we went with the cavatappi noodles.

The meal came together easily enough and the cavatappi noodles didn’t seem to make a difference so I’m pretty sure any pasta will work fine with this recipe. The “lightly scrambled” eggs were an interesting experiment and surprisingly didn’t turn into a wad of eggs at the bottom of the pan, but you do have to stir the pasta constantly when you add them!

Overall this was a good recipe but it took a lot of prep time for something that tasted like you spent 5 minutes on it. It did reheat well and wasn’t horribly expensive to make.  We also had enough leftovers for each of us to have lunch the next day.

Main ingredients: Any kind of pasta, Olive Oil, grated parmesan cheese, onion, eggs, and dry white wine.

Cost: Most of the ingredients were already in our house so the most expensive thing to buy was the wine, followed by the bacon. Overall cost was $12 for the wine and bacon, but you can get cheaper bottles of wine at Trader Joes.