When you love pasta, you love it in every possible way it could come. However, there are days when simplicity can also do you in. That was the case with this easy pasta carbonara recipe. I didn't feel like chopping up too many ingredients or cooking up a marinara or alfredo sauce. I wanted some simple and quick but also comforting. The answer was this easy carbonara pasta recipe. The only way it could have been simpler is a butter tossed pasta. This packs so much flavor though that you don't even realize how easy it was to put together.

Here's the recipe for Easy Carbonara Pasta.

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Click on the photo for the recipe.

The Daring Bakers challenge for March was to make your own spinach pasta for this Lasagne Verdi al Forno. This was my first time making pasta and since I don't own a pasta maker, I ended up making the pasta the old fashioned way, by hand. I must say it was an enjoyable experience and one that I won't mind doing again. As a matter of fact, I have requests to make it again this weekend!

If you've always wanted to try making pasta and were too intimidated to do it, I say give it a go. You'll find it's really not as hard as you thought it would be. Just watch the video below. You can be doing this in no time!




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My sister brought this small bottle of Colatura di Alici for me when she went to Italy. Did you know that early Romans made a fish sauce called Garum, made by fermenting fish such as anchovies, tuna or mackerell resulting in this amber liquid. This is how it is made in the Philippines too, we call this Patis, commonly known as fish sauce.

Is there are difference between this colatura and patis other than it costs ten times more? Not much, really. They both have a salty taste and a slightly briny aroma. Actually, this colatura is just slightly more fishy smelling than patis. Hard to believe if you've ever smelled patis. It is definitely an acquired taste if you're not used to it. Me, I use it for everything. My husband swears I've slowly poisoned him with patis. He didn't use to eat fish before he met me. He does now.

How to use it? I use it in anything that needs fish sauce. I even use it as a dipping sauce, cut with a spritz of lemon. On pastas, just drip a couple of drops just before finishing and you essentially knock the flavors up a notch. Try it next time you make linguini with clam sauce or shrimps with alfredo sauce and you'll love it. Try it also on fresh, vine ripened tomatoes; sliced sprinkled with a few drops of fish sauce and a few turns from the pepper cracker and you'll be in heaven.

Try it. You'll like it :)


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I am still not up to cooking much. We have just been cooking old standbys like soups...lots of soups. It has been wickedly cold, but I am not going to complain because I know plenty others who are having a much harsher winter than we are.

While going through my saved drafts, I realized that I haven't posted this one yet. Perhaps it was because it was such a simple recipe that I decided to hold off on it. I don't know. But when I saw the photos I just made me remember last summer when we had such an abundance of basil that I started putting it in everything until the kids had pesto coming out of their ears. Not really, that was just a figure of speech, but you get it.

Anyway, I was making so much pesto that we just had to use them up before it went bad. For the salmon, it is really simple. All I did is to take some of the pre-made basil pesto sauce that I had saved in the fridge, about a cups worth, and mixed it with about half a cup of mayonnaise then slathered it on the side of salmon. Bake it for about 20 minutes at 400 degrees, and you have dinner! Serve with salad, and in this case, pasta with, what else, pesto sauce.

I have one child who is a pasta addict and hates fish. Can you guess who it is? Yes, the Clone. The girl can eat spaghetti everyday. So just for a change because even I get tired of cooking the tomato sauce variety sometimes, we decided to try this recipe (Zucchini Carbonara) from Good Cooking - the new basics by Jill Dupleix. This cookbook is one of our best finds on the bargain section. We have cooked several recipes from this book and they are all good. This is one of them. The recipe is called zucchini carbonara, but when I got ready to make this I realized I only had broccoli on hand. We have since tried it with zucchini and it's even better! Note: I made this for five pasta eating people, so I actually doubled the proportions in the book. Hubby also had to have some meat so I added sliced, pan fried chicken breasts. This version is what I made.

INGREDIENTS:
16 oz (1 lb) penne pasta
Sea salt and coarsely ground black Pepper
1 bundle of broccoli (florets only, save stems for another recipe)
5 egg yolks
3/4 cup freshly grated parmesan
2 teaspoons grated lemon zest
Pan Fried (can also be grilled) chicken breasts, sliced

Cook the pasta in boiling, salted water until they are al dente, between 8 to 10 minutes. Add the broccoli florets in with the pasta for the last minute of cooking, just until the broccoli takes on a bright green color before removing the pasta and broccoli from the water.

While the pasta is boiling, mix in a large bowl the egg yolks, parmesan cheese, lemon zest, sea salt and pepper together (see first photo). When the pasta and broccoli are done, drain them from the boiling water and quickly add to the mixture in the bowl and mix. Add some of the cooking water if the mixture/sauce seems too thick. The heat from the pasta and cooking water cooks the eggs in the sauce. The sauce should be creamy and fragrant. Either stir in the chicken pieces or just lay them on top of the pasta. Sprinkle with additional parmesan cheese if desired.

Jade also made this dish on her own using zucchini:

Ever since my sisterO gifted me with a potful of saffron and given my love of tiramisu, I had been fantasizing about Rowena's Tiramisu allo Zafferano. I'm actually starting on a new quest of trying out all the versions of tiramisu there is. I found out recently that the ubiquitous ice box cake in the south is a close cousin to the trendy tiramisu. This, our first attempt at tiramisu, was delicious! Rowena said this serves 8-10. LOL! I had to laugh at that, there's only five of us, and we finished three fourths of this bowl in one sitting. It was that good!

Continue to the tiramisu recipe...

Jade made this soup last Sunday, Halloween. It was so good after being out in the cold night air. She said she saw it on the food channel one day, and it looked interesting to her so she wanted to try making it. I was so busy last Sunday that I didn't really get a chance to help her other than yelling to her where things are in the kitchen. We had to leave before she could finish the soup, so she left instructions for her dad to drizzle the eggs and keep the soup warm.



MEATBALLS:
1 onion grated or finely chopped
1/3 cup chopped fresh Italian parsley
1 lg. Egg
1 teaspoon minced garlic
1 teaspoon salt
1 slice fresh white bread, crust trimmed and torn into small pieces
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1/2 pound of Ground Beef
1/2 pound of Ground Pork
Freshly ground black pepper

SOUP:
12 Cups low-sodium chicken broth
1 pound curly endive, coarsely chopped or escarole would be a good substitute
(she used spinach since I couldn't find curly endive or escarole in the market)
2 lg. Eggs
2 tablespoons of freshly grated Parmesan cheese, plus extra for garnish
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

To make meatballs, stir all the ingredients together. Shape the mixture into 1 inch diameter balls and place on a baking sheet.

In a stock pot, bring the broth to a boil over medium heat. Add the meatballs and spinach (or curly endive if you have it) and simmer until they are cooked through, about 8-10 minutes. Whisk the eggs and Parmesan cheese in a medium bowl to blend. Stir the soup in a circular motion and gradually drizzle the egg mixture into the moving broth, stirring gently with a fork to form thin strands of egg (dad was not too successful doing this, they came out in lumps, but the flavor was still good).

In honor of the Clone (my youngest daughter) whose birthday is tomorrow and who loves anything with pasta, this is for you, baby! We actually had this last week, as we have to have something akin to spaghetti at least once a week for the clone, but I just haven't had time to post much since it has been a hectic week for me at work. This is you basic tomato sauce, only with italian sausage instead of plain ground meat.



My basic spaghetti sauce recipe is here. I took the sausage out of the casing, since for some reason the Clone will not eat sliced sausages in her sauce. She like it this way though.

My recipe for this sauce changes all the time, it just depends on what I have on hand. This is the simplest version, without any additional vegetables or meats.




Click here for the Meat Sauce recipe