Day 11: Improv pasta

A bit of a deflating day today. Being as it’s Friday, and I’m tired and got home late, it would have been easy to jump at Mike’s offer to go get Inglewood Pizza. But I knew if we opened up two boxes of steaming, cheesy pies on the coffee table, I’d devour more than is good for me. Sometimes I jump at the challenge of an empty fridge.

Besides, the $25 that would have gone toward pizza can buy a pretty nice bottle of wine, which I drank half of.

So I rustled around in the fridge and came up with 3 slices of bacon, something I usually don’t have on hand but is still leftover from BT, the last of a teeny bottle of sun dried tomato pesto (remember last week’s pizza?), and there is always a bag of peas in the freezer, dried pasta of some shape in the cupboard and eggs in the fridge for Willem’s favorite eggs and toast. So. Game on!

I chopped and cooked the bacon while the spaghetti boiled. If you pour off the fat as it cooks, you can replace it with some canola oil, which will absorb the flavor of the bacon without being as high in saturated fat. (It occurred to me that with some half & half and Parmesan cheese I could make pasta carbonara, but then we might as well just order the pizza…)

Halfway through cooking the pasta, throw a handful of peas into the water and let them cook along with it. Dump the whole thing into a colander, saving some of the cooking water, then return to the pot and toss with the bacon and oil/drippings from the pan, an egg you’ve whisked a bit with a fork, a few spoonfuls of sun dried tomato pesto and a bit of Parmesan. Toss to cook the egg (the heat of the pasta and the hot pan will cook it sufficiently), adding a little of the pasta water if you don’t want it as dry. Add a good grinding of pepper. Serve with red wine (or beer, or prossecco, or scotch, or ginger ale) in front of Earth vs. the Martians.

It’s becoming apparent I enjoy eating dinner on the couch.