It’s difficult to flesh it out much more than the title.  It’s easy, stupid easy.  In fact if you were to have a girl around to your place to cook her dinner and you cooked this and made some garlic bread and got a bottle of wine and a salad, I reckon you’d be a chance for a back rub after dinner and it’d be the easiest meal for two you’ve ever cooked.

As a side note, stop buying bad pasta.  You shouldn’t do it.  The standard 500g dried pastas that you get from Coles and Woolworths (in particular their generic brands) are tasteless rubbish.  The best results but most effort is your own fresh pasta made from type 00 flour and eggs, but if you are going to buy dried pasta get something produced on a smaller scale from an independent producer.  The stuff in the picture is “Aussie Gold Premium Wheat Linguine” and has a very wheaty flavour to it, it’s $3.85 for 300g as opposed to the $1.60 – $2.00 / 500g pastas in supermarkets.  It’s really worth it.

Carbonara is derived from the Italian word for charcoal but that’s about all we know for sure.  Things like this are absolutely drenched in urban myths from some saying that the it was made for the charcoal men (a secret society that helped unify Italy) through to it originally containing squid ink (making it the colour of charcoal).  There are also fights over what it should contain, but my recipe gives it the basics and it’s delicious.

Ingredients

  • Enough pasta for two people, about 300g
  • 3 egg yolks
  • cream
  • 8 button mushrooms
  • a clove of garlic
  • 7 – 8 slices of pancetta
  • heaps of shaved parmesan chass

Method

Two-thirds fill a large pot with water, several large pinches of salt (DO IT, DON’T ARGUE, YES YOU SALT THE WATER).  Once it’s boiling fiercely, add the pasta.  If the water isn’t boiling hard the pasta runs the risk of sticking together.

While the pasta is cooking, slice the pancetta into strips and the mushrooms into slices, cutting the stalks flush with the cup.  Dice the garlic and add it to a hot frypan, adding the pancetta and mushrooms.  As that browns, put the egg yolks into a medium sized coffee mug, top the cup up to 3/4 full with cream and crack plenty of black pepper into it.  Beat it lightly so you get a fairly smooth mixture and it’s not still seperated.

Once the pasta is cooked (about 7 or 8 minutes), strain it of all but a couple of tablespoons of the water.  Return it to the pot and turn the heat down to its lowest, and then add the egg mixture, pancetta, garlic and mushrooms and stir through for a couple of minutes while the egg and cream turns into a thicker sauce (it may break up slightly as you do this, that’s normal).

Add half a fistful of the parmesan and use the other half to garnish.  Nom.