Pasta Carbonara

This past Sunday, I had a couple friends over to watch football. I wanted to make a dinner that didn't take much effort on my part, but would deliver an insane amount of flavor. My friend Sean is a huge bacon and onion fan and I had a ton of both from a recent Sam's Club excursion. So I decided on a pasta, but not just any pasta. The king of pastas, Pasta Carbonara.

Ingredients:

• 3/4 lb of bacon
• 4 cloves of garlic
• 1 medium red onion
• 4 large eggs
• 3/4 lb of Parmigiano Reggiano
• 2 Tablespoons of butter
• 1 cup of white wine
• 1 cup of beef stock
• 1 pound of fresh linguini
• large handful of fresh parsley
• Crushed Red Pepper
• Kosher Salt
• Fresh Ground Pepper
  

First up, take your bacon and chop it up. If you throw a couple extra slices in here, it won't hurt the dish at all.

Throw it in a pan with a little pepper. Cook the bacon until it's barely crispy. We still want it a little chewy.

In the meantime, dice up your red onion.

And dice up your garlic.

Remove your cooked bacon from the pan and set aside on a plate. DO NOT throw out the bacon grease, that would be a terrible tragedy. You can remove some of the renderings, but save at LEAST two to three tablespoons to cook the onion and garlic.

Throw your onions in the pan with the bacon grease along with salt and pepper. About this point you should be getting a pan ready with water to cook your pasta.

When the onions are soft, add the garlic.

Cook for a few minutes until the garlic softens and smells wonderful, then remove. Do NOT take this pan to the sink though (or even remove it from the heat). Do you see all that brown stuff on the bottom of the pan? We are going to turn that into deliciousness.

Start by hitting your hot pan with the cup of white wine. Get a wooden spoon or some sort of spatula to get those brown bits off the pan. Did you drop your pasta yet? My water is boiling and the pasta is down.

Then follow it with the cup of beef stock and the two tablespoons of butter and let it cook down. We will reduce this mixture by about half.

While your sauce is reducing, grate your wedge of parmigiano reggiano into a large bowl. The bowl must be large enough to hold all of your ingredients including the pasta.

To the cheese, add 4 eggs and about a 1/2 of a teaspoon of crushed red pepper. You can add more if you like it spicier.

Now add your parsley, freshly chopped. Don't be shy here. It won't hurt.

Mix it all up with some.....fresh ground pepper. It just goes so well with this entire dish.

This is what your delicious mixture should look like now.

Drain your pasta. I have linguini here, but you can use any type you want. I prefer the wider noodles for a royal dish such as this.

Drop the pasta in to your mixture while it's still hot. This is of the utmost importance. The heat will melt the cheese and cook the eggs. Add you're 3/4 cup of reduce mixture at this point now too. Just pour it onto the pasta. Mix this up really well.

Serve with bread and a nice glass of wine. Just writing this recipe makes me hungry again. This is a dish I will definitely revisit very soon.

Lasagna

First off, let me say that this is my first blog post ever. I have never taken pictures of food before today, so please forgive me if they come out a little blurry and less professional than you expect to see. In the future I will try to do better.


Ingredients:

• 3 Cans of Whole Tomatoes (14.5 oz each)
• ½ can of tomato paste (6 oz)
• 1 can of tomato sauce (8 oz)
• 1 medium onion
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 2 tsp of Italian Seasoning
• 1 tsp of Oregano
• Pinch of sugar
• Pinch or two of Crushed Red Pepper
• 1 splash of Red Wine
• 1 32 oz tub of Ricotta Cheese
• 1 handful of fresh Parsely
• 2 eggs
• 2 lbs of Italian Sausage (I mixed 1 lb of Hot and 1 lb of Sweet)
• 1 lb of Lasagna noodles
• 2 lbs of Mozarella cheese (and a little parmesan if you have it!)

Everybody loves lasagna, and I have had many requests from friends to make my recipe for them. I make this as gifts for people and they are forever in my debt. This recipe that I used tonight, will create one 9x14 inch pan filled with lasagna and one 8x8 pan filled with lasagna. You may ask, “Kenny, why would you create such an odd combination?”. Like I said earlier, I gift this and I had a friend do an incredible favor for me this past weekend. Big enough to deserve the ultimate gift. The 9x14 is for my friend and his family, however I couldn’t justify making lasagna without keeping some for myself, and that is where the 8x8 comes into play. This could make one LARGE 9x14, just make sure you have a real deep pan b/c it will be 4-5 layers high. Oh God, that would be a delicious lasagna. Anywho, enough with the introduction, on to the recipe.


First things first, remove the casings off of the sausages. Toss them into a pan with some kosher salt, a little pepper, and a little Italian seasoning.

Then proceed to brown them in a large pan. The key here is to use a high heat and caramelize bits of the sausage. You can see the little bits of brown in the image below. We call that deliciousness.

Once brown, remove the sausage from the pan and all but 2 tbsp of the left over grease (mmmm…..pork fat). Place the sausage in your refrigerator as we will come back to that a little later. Dice up the medium onion and place it into the saucepan with the left over sausage grease. Season with a little salt and pepper. Cook over medium-low heat until slightly translucent, about 5 minutes.

Dice up the cloves of garlic and add to the onions in the pan (with a little salt and pepper, of course!). Cook until fragrant, about 2-3 minutes.

Take 3 ozs (half of the can) of tomato paste and add to the onion/garlic mixture. Stir well and turn the heat to medium high. Keep an eye on this for the next 3-4 minutes, as you want to caramelize the sugars in the tomatoes, but do not want it to burn.

Once the paste has darkened, add the can of tomato sauce, and the 3 cans of whole tomatoes diced and with seeds removed (add the juice too, since we will reduce it anyway). Throw in the 2 tsp of Italian seasoning, the teaspoon of oregano, a pinch of sugar and the crushed red pepper.

Put a splash of red wine in (I used a Pinot Noir I had open, but you can get away with nearly any red wine here. Nothing fancy) and let simmer for 15 minutes.

Then throw the sausage back in the sauce and simmer for another 15 minutes.

If you are anything like me, you will realize that you have made a complete mess of the kitchen and right now is the perfect time to play catch up on clean up. After you clean up and while the sauce is still simmering (it didn’t take you 30 min to clean up, did it?), prepare your ricotta filling. Mix the full 32 oz of ricotta cheese with 2 eggs and a handful of parsley.

It should look like this:

Get a large pot, fill it with water and set on high (don’t forget to season the water with salt). Once boiling, drop your pasta in (lasagna noodles, of course) and cook to al dente (it should be about 8-9 minutes, follow the instructions on the box of pasta). I don't have pictures for this part b/c my lense would steam up when trying to take the picture. Besides, everyone knows how to cook pasta, right? Of course, so onwards to the easiest part, assembly. If you are using disposable pans like I am, make sure that you wash them before use to clean off any of the manufacturer’s glue (not to mention anybody’s germs who handled the pans before you). First, add a layer of sauce to prevent the noodles from sticking to the bottom.

Next add a layer of noodles followed by a layer of ricotta.

Follow that with a layer of sauce again and a layer of mozzarella cheese. I had a little left over parmesan cheese, so I am mixing that in with the mozzarella. Can you tell the difference between the two cheeses?

Follow with noodles, ricotta, meat sauce, mozzarella/parmesan mix until you run out of room or ingredients. Finally, sprinkle a little parsley on top to make it look pretty and you are good to go. You should end up with a masterpiece of cuisine that looks almost as good as it tastes.

You can cover this with plastic wrap and then foil and freeze for up to 6 months. Or, or if you are anything like me, you will cover with foil and bake in a 375° oven for 30 minutes. Remove foil and bake an additional 15 minutes or until gooey and bubbly. If you are wondering why all my previous posts have an aluminum foil pan and this last one is glass, allow me to explain. No, I am not trying to pull the bait and switch on you. I had original thought I was going to have enough ingredients to make two lasagna pans worth. That failed to happen and so I had to use a smaller pan for my dish. My friend still gets the large pan.

Dinner fit for a king. I poured myself a glass of the red wine that I used for the sauce, a 2006 Robert Mondavi Pinot Noir for you winos out there. Then I went to town. I will close my first blog post with the final image I saw before dinner tonight. Yes, that is a piece of garlic Texas Toast on the plate next to the lasagna.

Please leave comments, and feel free to try this recipe at home. More to come soon!!