Maki Soup

Posted on May 15, 2013 by

If you saw the word “maki” in the name of this soup and thought sushi, let me set your mind at ease (because sushi soup would definitely make me uneasy). It has nothing to do with that kind of maki. It isn’t from Japan at all. It’s from the Philippines! In fact, I think I might not be wrong if I characterized it as being the Filipino equivalent of chicken noodle soup, even though it hasn’t got chicken or noodles in it. But it’s warm and comforting and a little spicy, and I could really see this being what people’s moms make them when they aren’t feeling well. And it was just Mother’s Day just now! So there we are.

This recipe comes from Salu-Salo, who is from Vancouver, just like me! I did make one change to it, though, and that was since I don’t have any tapioca starch, I thickened it with corn starch. I don’t know if that is more thickeny (it’s a word. You shut your mouth.) than tapioca starch is, but it REALLY thickens up. “Gelatinous” is a word that was used, although I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration. I didn’t think it was unpleasant, but just be prepared going in. If that worries you, cut down the amount of cornstarch (and, proportionally, the water you dissolve it in).

Maki Soup

Ingredients
1 1/2 lb pork, cut into chunks
1 1/2 tsp pepper
2 tbsp soy sauce
1/4 cup cornstarch
2 eggs, separated
6 cups water
1 beef bouillon cube
another 2 tbsp soy sauce
1/2 cup (or less) cornstarch, dissolved in an equal amount of water
2 or 3 stalks green onions, chopped

Method
Combine the pork with the 1/4 cup cornstarch, pepper, the first 2 tbsp of soy sauce, and the whites of the 2 eggs, mixing well.
Cover and put aside in the fridge for 30 minutes.
Put the water on to boil.
When it’s boiling, add the other 2 tbsp of soy sauce and the bouillon cube, stirring to dissolve the bouillon cube.
Add the pork and cook for about 5 minutes – you’re supposed to be able to tell if it’s time by the pork floating to the surface, but if it sticks to the bottom, you might need to give it a stir.
Stir in the cornstarch/water slurry (now that’s the kind of word you like to see in a recipe!) slowly.
Beat the egg yolks in a separate bowl.
Slowly drizzle the beaten egg yolks into the soup, stirring as you go to break it up.
Remove from the heat and add the green onions.
I served it garnished with more green onions, because I never met a green onion I didn’t like, but that’s not necessary.

A note about leftovers: most of the time I’ll eat leftovers cold. Partly because I’m a renegade, and partly because just about anything is good cold. This is not good cold. You need to heat it up first to kind of melt it a bit, so it’s not a brick of cold, thick jello – and also the unbelievable velvety texture when it’s hot – which might be from the cornstarch thickness, or might be from the egg – is not so good when it’s cold.

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Cheesy Bacon Pops

Posted on May 10, 2013 by

These are bittersweet. No, no, not in flavour – they are neither bitter nor sweet – but they were made for a block party that didn’t wind up happening when we thought it would. So here’s the story.

Matt ran into a neighbour who said hey, we’re having a block party on Saturday, you guys should come. And he said that sounds great, because a block party always sounds great and our neighbours are a lot of fun. And on Saturday morning I went off to the gym, as I do, and came back by way of the grocery store where I picked up some ingredients, and got home and got to cooking (specifically, these, in case you weren’t following along). And it was midday and nice out and I kept looking outside to see if people were starting to gather, but no, it was just a few kids playing in the street and no sign of a party. I started to wonder if maybe we had gotten the date wrong. Maybe it was tomorrow. Maybe it was next weekend. Surely it wouldn’t be at night? It’s not that warm out yet that it stays substantially warm after the sun goes down. We had a couple of other things to do; our friends always participate in Somerville Open Studios, since they are artists, and we always go over and hang out at their apartment, drink beer, eat pretzels, and maybe buy some art (which we could then add to our collection of unhung art). And then that evening, I had tickets to a roller derby bout, which is one of my favourite things and something I don’t get to go to often, because the place they normally play is way out in the sticks – but this was right in town! And anyway we’d already paid for the tickets. So we went about our day, and when we got home from the bout, about 10 at night, what did we see? A few neighbours hanging around outside, the party having just wrapped up!

Naturally, what we did was go inside, feeling like jerks who snub their neighbours whom they honestly like a lot, and soothe our troubled hearts by eating a bunch of these little cheesy, bacony nuggets.

The recipe comes from Taste and Tell, but I made a couple of important changes. Well, only one of them was important. The unimportant change was that in my cutting up and then rolling up of my rolls, they did not end up as crescents, not really – more as just pockets of goodness surrounded by dough – and I got fewer of them out of each slab of dough than the original did. The important change, though, was that I sauteed the onions. In the bacon grease. You absolutely need to do this. If you don’t, I will come to your house. You have an onion; why wouldn’t you saute it – you have bacon grease; why wouldn’t you saute in it?

Cheesy Bacon Pops

Ingredients
1 8-oz package cream cheese (the block kind, not the tub kind), softened
8 slices bacon, cooked and crumbled
1/3 cup parmesan
1 small onion, diced
2 tbsp chopped parsley
1 tbsp milk
2 packages crescent roll dough (you know, in the exploding cans. I’m trying not to name-drop brands here)

Method
Preheat oven to 375.
Cook your bacon (obviously, I already said it should be cooked… just checking if you were paying attention) and put it on paper towels to drain.
Throw the onion into the bacon grease and saute for about 5 minutes or until translucent.
I put them in a paper-towel-lined bowl to drain, but that’s your call, if you think they’re going to grease up the proceedings or not.
Mix together all of the ingredients except for the rolls themselves (again… obviously).
Unroll the roll dough and press the triangles together to make rectangles.
Spread a couple of tablespoons of filling on each rectangle.
With a sharp knife, cut the rectangles into 8 wedges (I did this by cutting it into quarters and then doing a diagonal across each quarter).
Roll up the wedges from the point.
Place them on a greased or lined baking sheet, seam side down.
Bake for 12 – 15 minutes or until golden.

They’re best warm, but they will certainly do the trick cold. They hit all the savory notes you might want – the crunchy, salty bacon, the onions infused with that same bacony goodness, the cheese being all creamy with a little sharpness from the parmesan, and then the parsley brightening it all up. All wrapped in pillowy dough. And it might seem like all I ever do anymore is wrap things in pastry, but really… what’s wrong with that?

Posted in food, side dishes/appetizers, snacky things | 2 Comments

Hoisin Meatballs

Posted on April 28, 2013 by

I’m going to jump right in here with no preamble. These are the tenderest meatballs I’ve ever eaten. I don’t mean that they aren’t browned and crisp on the outside; they are – but they just melt in your mouth. Maybe it’s because i used 80/20 beef instead of a less fatty blend – but hey, I needed a pound of ground beef and that blend had exactly-1-pound packages at the store, and that never happens; you have to jump on an opportunity like that when it presents itself. Or maybe it’s because they have sesame oil in them, which I usually just extol for being delicious and making everything taste better, but it IS an oil, so we are adding fat here (you’ll live). I don’t know. But make them and see for yourself!

The recipe comes from the reliably top-notch Baltic Maid, and I know I’ve been posting recipes I got from her site fairly frequently, but it’s just a really good site and nearly everything on it is something I want to make!

I’ve thought uncharitable thoughts about hoisin sauce in the past – specifically that it can be really sweet. But the glaze here, while it is hoisin-based, is not too sweet; you’ve got a good slug of vinegar in there to cut that sweetness down.

Hoisin Meatballs

Ingredients

for the meatballs
1 lb ground beef
1 tsp sesame oil
1/2 cup panko breadcrumbs
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1 egg
2 cloves garlic, minced or grated
3 green onions, sliced
salt and pepper

for the glaze
1/4 cup hoisin sauce
2 tbsp rice wine vinegar
1 tbsp soy sauce
1/2 tsp sesame oil
2 cloves garlic, grated (I grated garlic for the first time! It worked!)
1/2 tsp ground ginger

Method

for the meatballs
Preheat oven to 400.
Mix all the meatball ingredients together.
Roll them into balls and arrange them on a lined baking sheet.
Bake for 12 minutes or until browned.

for the glaze
Whisk together all the glaze ingredients.

Serve the meatballs (over rice, if you like) covered with the glaze and garnished with more sliced green onions and sesame seeds.

Sweet without being cloying, and so tender.

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Pesto Potato Pinwheels

Posted on April 18, 2013 by

Ok. Gonna go back to talking about food now. Remember how I started this blog because I used to have one where I talked about myself and my day and my thoughts, and after 9 years it was tired and people were yelling at me about my life? And I promised not to do that anymore and just write about food so people could only yell at me about matters of the palate? I haven’t been all that good at sticking to that dictum and keeping my non-food life out of it except where strictly necessary, but I’m going to close that door firmly on this particular occasion because otherwise I’ll seriously never get back on topic.

These little nuggets actually wound up being my dinner the other day; the band was coming over to hang out and have a few drinks, so I thought I’d throw down something snacky and they’d wind up getting pizza or something for their actual dinner and I could perhaps have a slice. I didn’t know they had already stopped for some food right by the practice space, so no further food was forthcoming except what I prepared myself. Ergo, pinwheels for dinner.

The recipe comes from Tales of an Overtime Cook, and while I remained true to the spirit of the recipe – it’s still mashed potatoes with pesto (just pause and think about that for a second) rolled up in puff pastry and baked. But I made pesto rather than using what she refers to as an “imitation pesto” – meaning frozen chopped basil that she then mixed with other pesto ingredients. I did my usual “a handful of this, a handful of that” method with the food processor and gave it a few good whizzes until everything was, well, as close to a paste as I could make it. Also , I followed the recipe correctly, but I don’t think you should, necessarily, at least with regard to the potatoes. I have a tupperware full of pesto mashed potatoes in my fridge. Not that this is the worst thing in the world, but save yourself some money and buy one less potato. That is how I will write the recipe, rather than the way I actually made it. I was thinking about the texture of the mashed potatoes, as well – the recipe doesn’t call for milk to make them more creamy, which I’m on the fence about. We aren’t, after all, making regular mashed potatoes here, to be eaten just on their own. It’s a filling for something that will be baked. So maybe it doesn’t need to be as creamy as something you’d spoon onto your plate and eat alongside your dinner. But it might help with the spreadability, and it would definitely help with the leftovers. So I’ll leave that to your discretion.

Pesto Potato Pinwheels

Ingredients
2 russet potatoes, cut up
3 tbsp to 1/4 cup pesto – I’m not really sure how much I had, but it was somewhere around there
olive oil
2 sheets puff pastry, thawed

Method
Cook the potatoes until tender.
While that’s happening, make your pesto. Or open the jar, I guess – either way takes about the same amount of time.
When the potatoes are ready, drain them and mash them with the pesto, adding olive oil as needed for consistency.
Cut your puff pastry sheets into 3 strips each (they usually come letter-folded, so your 3 strips are nicely delineated for you and possibly already starting to come apart at the folds).
Preheat oven to 350.
Spread the mashed potato on each strip, leaving a thin border so it doesn’t all squeeze out.
Roll up the strip from the long side. This is going to get messy, but rolling from the short side, while easier, gives you a much bigger pinwheel, and fewer of them.
Take your long rolled-up tube and cut it into inch-wide (or smaller) pieces, using a serrated knife and quick strokes so you don’t smush the rolls.
Arrange the rolls lying on their sides (so, potato-side-up) on a lined baking sheet. They puff up a bit but not too much, so don’t worry about spacing them out too much.
Bake for 35 minutes or until just starting to go golden.

These are crispy, flaky, and smooth, with the pesto keeping it from being all beige (both in flavour and in colour). But right now all I can think about is how it stings to type this; I just tried to give blood today, and they test your blood first to make sure you’re not too anemic – both so that you don’t give out loser blood and so that you don’t faint afterwards. If you’re not familiar, they do that by pricking your fingertips. Of course they went after my index and middle fingers, which not only are used in typing, but also in all the scrolly sweepy pokey things one does these days on touch-screen devices and laptop touchpads. I took my bandaids off to wash dishes, and now I just feel like I should put bandaids back on just for the padding.

And guess what? Too anemic to give blood, after all! Like, just a bit. Not enough to be a danger to myself, but enough that they don’t want to chance me hitting the deck after they take my blood out. I was set to give platelets, since they had a long wait for whole blood (the First Lady had visited earlier in the day and that, combined with security, threw the schedule into an uproar) and I’m not fussy, they can have whatever they need of me – but even with platelets, where they don’t take as much of your blood out, so the risk of fainting isn’t as high, but I still didn’t make the cutoff. So basically my fingers hurt for nothing, and I haven’t been any help to anybody.

Posted in food, side dishes/appetizers, snacky things | 3 Comments

I’m ok

Posted on April 15, 2013 by

Hey – in case anyone was thinking “hey, she lives in Boston” and getting worried, I’m safe and sound, and so is my husband and all our friends. Some people I know were nearby, but no one was in immediate danger. We are horrified at this disaster and rolling up our sleeves to help, but we weren’t nearby and got safely home.

Posted in meta | 2 Comments

Cinnamon Cake (or “cupcakes”)

Posted on April 5, 2013 by

These aren’t cupcakes. They weren’t meant to be cupcakes, and they don’t, if we’re being honest, really look like cupcakes, and yet there they are sitting in little cupcake cups. How can this be? I will tell you.

I was originally trying to use my new bundt pan for this recipe. It’s one of those super pointy bundt pans that make your cake look like avant-garde architecture, and I had never used it before. Everything seemed to be going ok, but then I took it out too soon – it was, in my defense, showing all the signs of being done, with the colour, the toothpick test, and the starting to pull away from the sides of the pan. But when I took it out and let it cool for a few minutes, it became obvious to me that it was not entirely done – maybe not in a “raw batter” sense, but definitely in terms of not pulling away from the pan anywhere but right at the top. It was proving impossible to get out. So I popped it back in the oven for another 10 minutes… but I think the damage was done. It was still tough to get out of the pan, and when it did come out, it came out in chunks and pieces. I couldn’t very well take a pile of (admittedly delicious) cake parts down to Easter dinner… at least, not as cake parts. I was going to have to camouflage this cake. That’s right. Cakeouflage.

And what I mean by that is I placed appropriate-sized chunks of cake in cupcake liners and tried to cover up a multitude of sins with the chocolate glaze. That’s it. No Cake Boss shenanigans here. Please, are you kidding me? I can barely frost a normal, non-camouflaged cake.

Cinnamon Cake with Chocolate Glaze

for the cake

Ingredients
1 1/2 sticks (12 tbsp… probably better not to think of it that way though) butter, softened
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup cake flour (which you can make from all-purpose flour by taking 2 tbsp of the flour out and replacing it with 2 tbsp of cornstarch)
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups sugar
3 eggs at room temperature (if you remember to take them out. If you don’t, I’m not here to judge you.)
2 tsp vanilla
1 cup sour cream

Method
Preheat oven to 350.
Grease and flour a bundt pan or some other kind of pan. I really do still believe this could work in a bundt pan and be really good!
In a bowl, whisk together the flours, salt, baking powder, baking soda, and cinnamon.
In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream together the butter and sugar for 3 minutes. It should be very light and fluffy.
Beat in the eggs and vanilla.
Alternate adding a third of the dry ingredients, a third of the sour cream, and so on until it’s all incorporated. Try not to overmix it.
Pour the batter into the pan.
Bake for 30 – 40 minutes, or until pulling away from the sides of the pan.
Cool in the pan, on a rack, for 15 minutes.
Unmold from the pan (haha, if you can!) and cool the rest of the way.

for the glaze

Ingredients
2 oz unsweetened chocolate
4 tbsp (1/2 stick) butter
1 1/2 cups icing sugar (or less; I think I ultimately only wound up using about a cup)
1/4 boiling water

Method
Melt the chocolate and butter together in a pot over medium-low heat.
Whisk in the icing sugar a little at a time until it starts getting too thick to whisk.
Stir in the boiling water.
If this makes it too liquidy, whisk in some more icing sugar.

Pour over the cooled cake. Bear in mind that this glaze sets up pretty quickly so you’ll want to have a swift hand.

So, this has happened before, but writing out the recipe, I’ve just realized that I might have forgotten to throw in the non-cake flour. That might explain my unmolding problems – but it didn’t make the cake a mess. It was nice and moist, but not to a point of unpleasantness. So I really have no idea if I left it out or not, but I guess that means you might be able to leave out a bunch of flour? Or not. Probably best to leave it in. Maybe then it’ll come out of the pan.

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Roasted Broccoli with Mozzarella

Posted on April 2, 2013 by

This came down to Easter with us as well. The original recipe, from Set the Table, which you have to check out – it’s the new blog from Tokyo Terrace’s Rachael White (since she’s not in Tokyo anymore), was about serving it warm, which is probably great – but she did say that it’s also good cold, and since I had to make it ahead, that’s how it had to be.

Now, all you foodbloggy people will drop your jaws to read this, but I’d actually never had roasted broccoli before! I’ve eaten plenty of broccoli in my life – it was a staple in my house growing up – but it was always either just steamed or stir-fried. Roasting anything is always a plus, because you get caramelization, you get depth and sweetness, and you get to toss things in olive oil and salt and applying heat to that little combination only ends well. It did call for a teaspoon of crushed red pepper flakes, and I might have had a bit of a heavy hand there since by this point all my measuring spoons were in the sink, but it was fine because the mozzarella cools things right back down.

Roasted Broccoli with Mozzarella

Ingredients
1 – 1 1/2 heads of broccoli, florets only
2 tbsp olive oil
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup (or more!) fresh mozzarella, cubed
the juice from half a lemon
1 tsp crushed red pepper flakes

Method
Preheat oven to 425.
Toss the broccoli with the olive oil and salt in a bowl.
Spread out on a rimmed baking sheet.
Roast for 10 minutes or until it’s starting to brown at the edges.
Toss with the lemon juice and crushed red pepper flakes, and also the mozzarella if you’re serving it hot.
If you’re not serving it hot, let it cool, and then stir in the mozzarella.

Now I really want to try it hot. I guess I should finish up my leftovers of the cold kind first, though, huh.

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Black Bean Hummus

Posted on March 31, 2013 by

I brought this down to have as part of the appetizer/nibblies table for Easter, and beyond testing it when I’d just made it, I haven’t even eaten any yet, but I’m already thinking of future applications for it. Just like with every other hummus I make, I’d like to put it in a grilled cheese, but I just read this post on Simply Life about making a black bean paste to use in huevos rancheros – and it sounds unbelievably delicious – so I’m thinking about making those and substituting in some leftover black bean hummus. Oh yeah.

The recipe for this came from Baltic Maid, and YOU WOULD THINK I changed it because of the cilantro, but I didn’t! I’m trying, you guys. Just because I don’t like something, or because it makes my face hurt to smell it, is no longer a good reason not to eat it. Or at least not to give it a try in something where it isn’t the overwhelming flavour! And I figured that since it’s only getting chopped up inside the food processor and that I don’t need to actually chop it out in the open air in front of myself, that it wouldn’t be so bad. And it wasn’t. I could still smell its sharp smell slicing into my sinuses, but it wasn’t as bad as if I’d actually been chopping it. Anyway, I’d bought what I assume was super legit cilantro at Americas’ Food Basket (the apostrophe is correct; the idea is that it is the food basket of the Americas, and therefore has plenty of food and ingredients for Latin dishes – and this hummus, while hummus, still has much that it draws from Latin flavours), so I figured that if there was any time to knuckle down and use cilantro, it was now.

Black Bean Hummus

Ingredients
1/3 cup cilantro
2 tbsp tahini
2 tbsp water
the juice of one lime
1 tbsp olive oil
2 tsp cumin
1/4 tsp salt
1 14-oz can black beans, drained and rinsed
1 clove garlic
chili powder

Method
Just put everything in a food processor and process until smooth, or smooth enough.

I don’t know if I had some kind of stingy lime, but it was a day’s work just to get some juice out of the thing! And yes, I did roll it on the counter first (in case you’re not already familiar, rolling a lemon or a lime on the counter first loosens up the fibres and makes it juice more readily). So I don’t know if it was the full 2 tbsp from the original recipe, but it was such a chore that I stopped measuring and just started squeezing it straight into the bowl of the food processor. So I’m just going to say use a lime, whether it is super juicy or not.

Posted in food, side dishes/appetizers, snacky things | 1 Comment

Corn Chili

Posted on March 24, 2013 by

First things first: our house has a new little resident! No, I wasn’t secretly gestating, like some friends I could name (although I suppose it wouldn’t have been a secret if we lived in the same city). Yesterday, we adopted a cat! She is a sweet little furball who used to belong to a hoarder (31 cats!!) and therefore is absolutely ecstatic about having someone paying attention just to her. She wouldn’t leave me alone yesterday while I was trying to make lunch; I was lucky to manage dinner without having to stop and pet her in the middle of chopping vegetables every 5 minutes. Her name is Nona, Nona F. Mecklenberg in full, and she has absolutely incredible whiskers – both the regular kind and the eyebrow kind. Look upon her!

When I was chopping the onions for this chili, I was actually worried, all of a sudden, that her little kittycat eyes were going to water, and was I being horrible, and I couldn’t warn her – but then I remembered that everyone in the world who has a cat chops onions all the time and their cats don’t all go blind or have to be taken away by the SPCA. She didn’t seem to mind.

The recipe comes from the estimable Dine and Dish, and I changed just a little – I always replace plain water with stock if it’s a savory dish, and if I have any on hand, and I did. I used vegetable stock, though, so if you don’t put cheese (or sour cream, I suppose) on top, this is an entirely vegan dish! That isn’t something I’m deliberately shooting for, but Matt now works at a place where they have a rule in their lunchroom that, out of consideration of the many vegetarian and vegan coworkers there, you can’t heat up any meat dishes. Presumably you can still eat them cold – it’s not a meat-free zone – but he could, if he so chose, bring in leftovers of this. And there are leftovers! This makes plenty, but I didn’t halve it since a) it is chili, which improves with age, and b) I hate halving canned ingredients. Then you have half a can of something ticking like a time-bomb in your fridge and dictating what you cook next so you can use it up. So no. Leftovers it is.

Also, this recipe has you making your own tortilla chips, and why wouldn’t you? It’s easy to death. The only reason not to, I suppose, would be if you were pressed for time (I had to do them in batches, for instance, so as not to crowd the pot), but you feel awfully impressed with yourself for making them and look like a complete overachiever despite just having cut up some tortillas and thrown them into hot oil. Which, by the way, since we are talking about frying something and not just sauteeing, I switched from olive oil to canola oil. You aren’t going to get the olive-oil flavour in your chips anyway due to the higher heat, and canola oil’s smoke point is lower so you can get more use out of it to fry things.

Corn Chili

Ingredients
2 tbsp canola oil, divided
2 or so corn tortillas, cut into strips or wedges (or both)
1 onion, diced
1 green pepper, diced
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 cups frozen corn kernels
1/2 cup stock, I used vegetable but you could also roll with chicken, or just water if you don’t have stock on hand
2 tbsp chili powder
1 1/2 tsp oregano
1 1/2 tsp cumin
1/4 tsp cayenne
1 14-oz can black beans, drained and rinsed
1 14-oz can diced tomatoes (keep the liquid)
salt and pepper
cheddar cheese and green onions (and sour cream, if you’re so inclined) to garnish

Method
Heat 1 tbsp of the oil in a pot over medium-high heat.
When it’s hot – actually hot, though, not just kind of warm – add the tortilla strips/wedges. Do it in batches if the pan would be crowded with all of them at once.
Fry until golden-brown on both sides.
Drain on a paper-towel-lined plate and sprinkle with just a little salt while still hot.
Add the remaining oil and turn the heat down to medium.
Throw in the onion, garlic, green pepper, and corn, and give it a good stir.
Stir in the chili powder, oregano, cumin, and cayenne.
Add the stock and cook for 4 minutes.
Stir in the beans and tomatoes.
Turn down to a simmer for 20 minutes.
Serve garnished with the tortilla chips and anything else your little heart desires.

This is a perfectly substantial chili without the meat, since you don’t just have beans, but also corn and peppers. I went for green rather than the original’s orange just so as to get even more rainbow-osity in my bowl (red tomatoes, yellow corn, green peppers…). I stayed on the light-handed end of the cayenne scale – the original suggested going up to 1/2 tsp if one felt the urge, but there’s a fair amount of heat in here. I suppose it depends on your chili powder, too.

So, in conclusion, we have a cat and she is the best cat.

Posted in food, meals, soup/stew | 2 Comments

Carbonara with Thyme

Posted on March 14, 2013 by

So this isn’t a true carbonara in many ways. First off, it has cream in it, which is anathema to purists. Second, as is obvious, it has thyme in it, which I think a purist would not feel is truly carbonara but may be considered an acceptable riff. Third, my sauce broke a little bit and we totally still ate it. Fortunately for me, and, depending on your outlook on life, maybe fortunately for you as well, I am not beholden to these strictures. Yeah! Carbonara outlaw! No rules!

If you want to take a little detour into outlaw territory with me, you won’t be sorry – the thyme is a really interesting addition because it brings a sweetness to the salty bacon that is, to me, way better than the whole maple bacon/getting syrup on your bacon nightmare. If you had asked me before I made this, I would have told you that the sweet/salty thing really only works with things that began sweet, and then you put a little kick of salt into them, like salted caramel or a couple chunks of salt on a chocolate or something. Maple bacon would have been, and in fact still is, a horror. But the different sweetness that the thyme brings is another story. It’s less sugary (er… obviously) but still sweet, and to me, if you want to do bacon with sweetness, this is the only way.

This recipe comes from Smoky Wok, and I halved it and still had leftovers. Also, she drained out her bacon grease and said to leave only a tablespoon or so, but I only had about that much to begin with so I left well enough alone. I also, um, meant to save some pasta water before draining the pasta, but I only remembered when I was mostly done draining it, so I righted the pot immediately and hoped there were still a few molecules of starchy water trapped between farfalle. Oops.

Carbonara with Thyme

Ingredients
1/2 lb farfalle
5 slices bacon, cut into nice healthy chunks, not slivered into tiny bits
half a bunch (which I recognize is probably indistinguishable from a bunch… I mean a half a bunch is still a bunch, it’s like saying half a hole) thyme
1/4 cup cream
2 egg yolks
1.5 tbsp parmesan
pepper

Method
Put the pasta on to cook according to package directions.
In a separate pan, put your bacon on to cook until crispy.
A couple of minutes in, add the thyme to the bacon pan and crank some pepper over it.
In a bowl, mix your egg yolks, cream, and parmesan.
If you’ve played your cards right, the bacon and the pasta should be done at just about the same time, so take the bacon off the heat, drain the pasta (except for a little bit of the water, if you remember), and stir the pasta into the bacon pan.
Now stir the eggy sauce in quickly while everything is still hot so it cooks, but stir it in fast so it coats the pasta, and doesn’t set and have scraps of egg. Do as I say, not as I do.

I don’t buy farfalle nearly enough. Who doesn’t like eating delightful little bowties?

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