Cougette Carbonara - Comfort with a Twist

There are some days when I long for some comfort food. After the long, rainy week we’ve had (which, incidentally, I’ve spent working very hard catering in the North of Scotland!), it’s just what I need. My ultimate comfort food is my Mum’s spaghetti Carbonara. It’s not the traditional Italian recipe – we add cream and white wine.

Totally traditional Italian spaghetti Carbonara just uses eggs; bacon or pancetta; a hard cheese like parmesan or pecorino; and plenty of freshly ground black pepper. In fact, on a family holiday to Italy a few years ago, I mentioned to a local lady that I needed some cream because I was making Carbonara for my family that evening, and she was horrified!

Nevertheless, I’m not ashamed to say that I love a bit of cream in my Carbonara sauce, and even some white wine for that extra bit of flavour. This time, though, I wanted to take it even further. I felt like the comfort of Carbonara, but with a twist.

There was a courgette in the fridge, so I thought I’d inject a few vitamins into what is, let’s face it, not usually the healthiest of meals. I remembered a method of making courgette ‘spaghetti’ I learned recently, so I thought I’d try mixing the courgette stuff with the real thing. In fact, if you wanted you could even try doing the whole thing with courgette spaghetti. I think you might find it a bit squishy, though.

Then I noticed half a leftover bread roll lurking at the bottom of the bread bin and figured I’d top my concoction with toasted breadcrumbs, just to use it up. I liked the result so much I thought I’d write it down for you all.

One last note – Carbonara isn’t really a suitable dish for expectant mothers, the very old or the very young, because there’s a slight risk of the egg being undercooked. If you are cooking for any of these groups, it’s better to overheat the egg and have it scramble a bit in the sauce than to give somebody salmonella. Safety first.

And now that I’ve put you all off, on with the recipe!

Ingredients

(per person)

½ a courgette

Small handful of spaghetti (a bit less than you have of courgette)

½ a small bread roll or one piece of sliced bread

A bit of butter

2 rashers of bacon

A slosh of white wine

A bigger slosh of double cream

1 egg

Grated hard cheese such as parmesan or pecorino

Salt and plenty of ground black pepper

Recipe

First of all, get your bacon in the oven to cook until crispy. Put the bread roll in the oven at the same time, until it’s turning brown and completely dried out.

Meanwhile, you want to slice the courgette into long, thin strips about the size and length of your spaghetti. I did this with a knife, but a mandolin works even better if you have one. Set it to thin julienne and just run the courgette up and down. There are plenty to choose from here if you’re interested in one – and no, I’m not being paid by Amazon, or by a mysterious consortium of mandolin-makers. I just like mandolins!

Whiz up the bread roll in your blender or magi-mix to make breadcrumbs. If you don’t have any fancy electric gadgets, you can always wrap the bread in a bag or tea towel and give it a good bash with a rolling pin. When you’ve got some nice small breadcrumbs, fry them off quickly and gently in butter until they’re hot, brown and crispy. Remove them from the pan onto some kitchen paper to drain.

Boil some salted water for the pasta and get the spaghetti going. Once the bacon is ready, chop it into bitesize pieces. Put it in the pan you used for the breadcrumbs, get it hot, then add the wine and reduce it by about half. Add the cream and bring the mixture briefly to a simmer. Then remove it from the heat, let it cool for a few seconds, and add the egg, stirring well so that it combines into the cream mixture without becoming scrambled. The egg will be cooked by the residual heat from the pan, but it should remain liquid.

When the pasta is about a minute away from being fully cooked (when it’s just too al dente for your taste, in other words) add the courgette strips and let them boil with the pasta for the remaining minute of 30 seconds – that’s all they need to cook.

Finally, mix the pasta and courgette into the cream, egg and bacon. Season it well with salt and lots of ground black peppercorns. Plop plenty into your bowl and top with the grated parmesan and breadcrumbs, and maybe a sprinkling of chopped parsley for some extra colour. Comfort with a twist!

A Porky Dilemma

A preliminary note - be picky about your pig

These days, pork is much less fatty that it used to be. The public’s taste tends to be for lean meat, so animals are now bred lean. This is why many people complain that roast pork is ‘too dry’ – the modern meat contains less veins of fat, despite the fact that fat is what used to give proper roast pork its moisture and deep flavour. However, some specialist breeders and food outlets are fighting this trend, particularly by introducing more unusual breeds of pig whose meat has fallen off the map. I’d urge you to search out this superior pork – it’ll make all the difference to your meal.

What to do with pork fillet?

Pork fillet is one of those things I’m never sure what to do with. I found some lurking at the bottom of my freezer recently, and immediately panicked about how to use it up. Just like beef fillet, it’s a lean cut which benefits from quick cooking to keep it tender and moist. Because it’s actually fat that gives meat a lot of its flavour, pork fillet (again like its beefy counterpart) is not, perhaps, the most flavoursome cut. Its appeal rests in its tender texture. However, unlike beef fillet, it can’t be eaten raw: unless your meat is carefully sourced and checked, raw pork can carry tapeworm, hookworm and various other nasties. So all those carpaccios and rare steaks – all that’s best about well-sourced beef fillet – are out of the equation with pork.

How, then, to make the best of this cut of lovely meat? With quick but thorough cooking, I think, and with lots of flavour added to make up for its lack of fat. A stir-fry springs to mind. The one below uses Thai flavours but is not authentically Thai, because while I love the Asian ingredients I’ve used here, I’m not nearly experienced enough in their proper use to presume to tell you about it. I can only tell you what I like to do with them.

A bit about stir-frying

To me, the principle of stir-frying is to cook your ingredients fast in a shallow layer of hot oil, continually moving them around by stirring them or tossing them in the pan keep the cooking even. It’s similar to the technique to French call sauté. You need to use oil with a high smoke point (if you’re not sure what that means, it’s the temperature at which the oil starts to smoke in the pan. Any cooking oil should do, but ideally not olive oil, which burns too easily). Later, I’ve said to ‘deglaze’ the pan with a mixture of lime juice, soy sauce and Thai fish sauce. Again, this is both a French and an Asian technique, and how I do it is not particularly authentic. Still, I like it.

The list of ingredients is long for this one, as is the method. It’s a lot easier than it looks, although the amount of chopping may sound a bit excessive. Do you really want to spend half an hour or more chopping stuff up? I think you do, for two reasons: First, it’s therapeutic, especially if you stick on a bit of music or catch up with some TV. You might even enjoy it. Second, you’ll definitely enjoy the meal. And from personal experience, I can guarantee that the leftovers taste fantastic cold the next day.

Make it your own!

As usual, remember that you can always put your own stamp on your food. By all means use different vegetables to the ones I've specified: red pepper springs to mind for some reason. Also fresh bean sprouts. The tail end of a beef fillet would be a fantastic replacement for the pork - ask your butcher. It's a lot cheaper than the fat end! Try adding some good-quality Thai curry paste (with the veg) and extra coconut milk (at the end) to turn your stir-fry into an extra-quick curry. Or you could marinade the pork for a while, with a bit of chilli, lime, garlic, soy sauce, nam pla and so on...

As always, the culinary world’s your oyster. Or your pork fillet, in this case. 

Ingredients

1 large courgette

Piece of whole pork fillet – it should look like the about same amount as you have of courgette

1 lime, zest and juice

1 handful unsalted cashews

1 chunk fresh ginger (about the size of your thumb), peeled and grated

1 clove garlic, crushed

1 chilli, deseeded and finely chopped

3-6 spring onions

Splash of soy sauce

Splash of nam pla (Thai fish sauce)

About 1/3 of a tin of coconut milk

Vegetable or sesame oil (olive at a pinch, but ideally not)

Small bunch of coriander

Thin noodles (fresh or dried)

Method

First of all, get all your ingredients chopped and prepared. Zest and juice the lime; grate the ginger; peel and crush the garlic; de-seed and finely chop the chilli (include the seeds if you like a bit more heat). Pull most of the stems off the coriander and roughly chop it. Cut the white end of the spring onions into small, wafer-thin rounds, and the floppy green end into thin strips. Open your tin of coconut milk and stir the solids into the liquid underneath. Fish your cashews out from the bag. You want everything to hand once you start cooking.

To prepare the courgette, peel off thin strips with a vegetable peeler. Cut these in half widthways, then pile them up and slice them lengthways into quarters. You should end up with thin, ribbon-shaped pieces that are about half the length of the original courgette.

If your noodles are dried, you need to cook them: pop them into salted water which has reached a rolling boil. Once they’re floppy and a bit softened, drain them and put them straight into a bowl of cold water to cool. The best way of telling if they’re done is to taste them! It doesn’t matter if they’re a tiny bit underdone, as you’re going to heat them up once you’ve finished the stir-fry anyway.

Final bit of preparation is the pork. First, slice the fillet into thin rounds. They should be less than 0.5cm thick if you can manage it (the main thing is to have a sharp knife!). Then slice up the rounds into thin strips, about the width of your strips of courgette or thinner.

Now you’re there with your preparation, you’re only ten minutes or so away from dinner. Hang in there – this is the good bit.

Pour a little pool of oil into the most non-stick frying pan or wok you have. Put it over a high heat until the oil is really hot. It shouldn’t be smoking – that means it’s close to burning – but it should be just below that. Drop a piece of pork in to test; if it sizzles, you’re on the money.

Slip all the pork into the frying pan, taking care it doesn’t spit hot oil all over you. Cook it fast until each piece is golden brown all over, keeping it moving with a spoon or spatula and always making sure it doesn’t stick. Then take it out of the pan and set it aside of a moment.

Now for the veg. Keep the pan hot and don’t worry about changing the oil – all that flavour from the pork will get soaked up by your veg as it cooks. Add the chilli, ginger and lime zest first and cook for half a minute or so. Then add the garlic and give it another half minute before you put in the courgette and both cuts of spring onion. Once the courgette looks fully cooked everything else should be too, so add cashews and put the pork back in at this point.

Now you deglaze – add the lime juice, soy sauce and nam pla, and scrape all the flavoursome goodies off the bottom of the pan as it bubbles madly. Turn the heat down a notch and stir in the coconut milk, then scrape the whole lot out of the pan and put it somewhere warm.

Last but not least, put the noodles in the pan (again, don’t clean it first) and stir them around a bit over the heat for a minute or two. At this point, if you like, you can add the stir-fry mixture to the noodles. I like to keep them separate for some mysterious reason, but each to their own.

Serve up in bowls, with a slice of lime and a generous sprinkling of chopped coriander to bring the colours back to life. Was it worth all that chopping? Of course it was!

Five-Vegetable Pasta Sauce

Hello and welcome back, dear reader. Today, I felt an overwhelming need for vitamins - a quick-fix diet of far too many crisps has left me gasping for something green and crunchy. Solution: a dash to the shops for as many vegetables as I could carry.

This simple, chunky and fresh-tasting sauce goes well with pasta or couscous, can easily be embellished with the herbs or spices of your choice, and, if you eat enough of it, pretty much deals with any 'five-a-day' problems in one easy swoop. As an inveterate carnivore, I added some smoked bacon lardons for that meaty kick, but my vegetarian readers can easily leave these out or replace them with some tofu pieces. Vegan readers, do this and then eat with egg-free pasta or couscous. Don't be overwhelmed by the fairly lengthy list of ingredients - they all go in together very easily, and the veg will only take a few moments to chop, I promise. You can replace any of the vegetables with your own favourites, and you don't even need to stop at five!

I won't include the pasta in the recipe, but some words of advice:

Use about 3 handfuls per person; cook in plenty of boiling water, very well-salted, as directed on the pack; and drain thoroughly before using. Al dente (still with a bit of bite there when you chew it) is the way to go.

Without more ado, then, on to the sauce:

Ingredients
(serves 3-ish)

Around 50g bacon lardons or cubes of pancetta (optional)
3 large spring onions
A good-sized courgette, washed
A medium head of broccoli
A red pepper, or pointed sweet pepper
2 large tomatoes
1tsp tomato puree
1 glass white/pink wine
1 pint tomato passata (or 1 tin chopped tomatoes)
Generous splash of balsamic vinegar
Salt and pepper
Shavings of Grana Padano/Parmesan cheese to garnish

Method

First of all, chop all of your vegetables into pieces (they don't have to be cubes - go with the natural shape of the vegetable) about 1cm square. This does mean cutting your broccoli smaller than you're probably used to, but it makes for a lovely, consistent sauce which is easy to eat.

Next, pop a good-sized frying pan with high sides on a medium heat and add the bacon pieces. You won't need oil - it's got plenty of fat in it already, which will melt as you cook it and lubricate the pan. When the bacon is beginning to brown, add the spring onions and the pepper and allow to cook for a couple more minutes. Then add the rest of the vegetables and the tomato puree, and again cook for a couple of minutes, turning gently to ensure everything is coated with oil and puree.

When all the veg is beginning to cook, add the white wine and let it bubble vigorously for a minute or two, then add the passata and balsamic vinegar. Simmer for ten minutes or so, or while you cook the pasta, then season to taste and serve on top of pasta, garnished with the shavings of cheese.

Note: if you'd like to add any herbs or spices, I suggest you add dry or ground with the onion, and anything fresh and chopped with the passata or right at the end. Some parsley mixed with the cheese shavings would be a great addition to the garnish, the bright green matching the fresh taste of the sauce.

Anyway - if you're ever feeling short of essential vitamins, you know what to do! Enjoy your daily shot of vegetables, folks.