Buon Appetito!

Tonight, I made some fresh spaghetti for a lovely dish from Jamie's Italy, Spaghetti alla Carbonara di Salsiccia. Well, the recipe calls for linguine...but I wanted to use my pasta press instead of the rollers, so that's what I did! :) This also gives me a perfect opportunity to talk to you about carbonara sauce, since it's one of my favorites! It is an egg-based sauce that usually incorporates Parmigiano or Pecorino cheese, as well as some parsley and some sort of pork product, usually bacon or pancetta. It's totally simple, and is an extremely easy week-night meal. You tack on a bit more time if you make fresh pasta, but you know what I say - it's always worth it to make fresh pasta!

Tonight, I started by making my pasta dough so that it could rest while I got my mise en place together. I set it aside for the necessary 30 minutes.



This is another recipe with very few ingredients so my mise en place was done very quickly. All you'll need is some extra virgin olive oil, some heavy cream, grated Parmesan, lemon zest, salt and pepper, some chopped parsley, chopped pancetta, 4 Italian sausages and 4 egg yolks.



While my dough was still resting, I moved on to the first step of the recipe - making the little sausage meatballs. I slit the skin on the sausage and slipped the meat out so that I had a pile of loose sausage meat. I rolled little pieces into meatballs, about the size of large marbles. I picked the perfect surface to work on, huh?

My dough was ready at this point to start running through my pasta press so I stuffed some in to start pressing while I started the next step. I put some olive oil in a large pan and heated it until the oil was warm. I poured my mini sausage meatballs into the pan and allowed them to fry on all sides until nice and golden.



Once the sausage was golden on all sides, I poured in my chopped pancetta and allowed the mixture to continue cooking until the pancetta started to become crispy and golden as well.



Meanwhile, my pasta dough had been fully turned into spaghetti noodles so I put a pot of salted water on to boil. While I was waiting for my "watched pot," I mixed the egg yolks, heavy cream, half of the parmesan, the lemon zest and the parsley together with a whisk. It turns into a lovely bright yellow mixture.



Once the pasta is finished cooking (8-12 minutes for boxed pasta; 3-4 minutes for fresh pasta), drain it in a colander, reserving just a little bit of the cooking liquid in case you need to thin your sauce a bit. Pour a little olive oil into the bottom of the pot that you cooked the pasta in, and then pour the pasta back in from the colander. At this point, pour the sausage and pancetta mixture into the pasta (try and avoid pouring the grease from the pan in if you can) and then pour the egg mixture on top. Quickly toss your pasta with some tongs so that the carbonara sauce coats all the noodles but doesn't scramble. The heat from the pasta will cook the egg gently so that it turns into a rich, gooey coating for the spaghetti. Be careful to continue tossing until all the noodles are well coated and there is no extra sauce cooking on the bottom of the pan...you'll have scrambled eggs if you're not watching what you are doing!



Once you've plated the pasta, sprinkle it with some of the leftover grated Parmesan. You can serve with a side salad, or a steamed veggie. Tonight, I chose to use Broccoflower. It just looked so bright and spring-y at the grocery store - I had to buy some!



That was DE-LISH-OUS!