pasta alla carbonara

This post is about a year late (sorry).  Ever since our trip to Italy last summer I have been wanting to make the perfect carbonara at home.  I had it once in Rome, at a little restaurant that really catered more to tourists than it did to actual Romans I think, but it was still perfection (no matter where we ate, I never had a bad pasta dish in Rome).  I’ve made carbonara plenty of times in the past 15 months, but it took me a while to find the right recipe, and then longer to perfect it to how I liked it (and make the portion perfect for the two of us, since it’s hard to split a recipe in half that calls for 5 eggs).  And then I was terrible about writing down what I had done in the kitchen (how many eggs? how much bacon?), and so just now, in the past month, have I finally felt like I’ve been making a consistent carbonara in my kitchen.

My only real complaint is that I have to make this with bacon instead of guanciale.  I know.  That makes me sound like a food snob, and I’m sorry.  But I’ve had dreams, like literal in the middle of the night dreams, of finding guanciale at my local grocery store and I cannot even tell you how disappointed I am when I wake up from that.

I saw some pork cheek at the grocery store a couple of weeks ago, and I’m seriously considering making some guanciale at home.  (I’ll let you know how that goes if I make that decision, although I’m not sure how I’d be able to squeeze that in to life right now).

But even with just plain old bacon, this is delicious.  And I was surprised at how easy carbonara was to make.  It really only takes about half an hour, which is within my time-limit for dinners right now, so it has become one of our regular quick weeknight pasta dishes.

And because I need to be reminded, and I think you could perhaps use this, too, here are a few more of our favorite quick pasta dishes:
– mushroom marsala pasta
– pasta with sausage and tuscan beans
– roasted red pepper pasta
– spaghetti with garlic and olive oil

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