March 18, 2006

Recipe News: Recipe for pasta carbonara

"Generally, I avoid foods that pretend to be other foods. They usually disappoint, bear little resemblance to the original and rightfully make vegetarians fodder for Saturday Night Live skits.

Thus, I pass on tofu turkeys and soy baloney. I won’t make “meat” loaf out of morsels of textured soy protein and think chocolate mousse rendered from carob and pureed tofu should be treated like a controlled substance.

Mind you, I love tofu and happily eat it, but only for its own sake. So I won’t hesitate to add cubes of seasoned tofu to a salad or stir fry because the soy is good in its own right and isn’t imitating anything.

Of course there are exceptions. I love veggie burgers and don’t consider them a violation of my rule. In (thankfully long gone) days of patties formed from mashed beans and lentils, veggie burgers were a sad masquerade.

Today they have a life of their own. In even the most conventional of grocers, consumers can select from dozens of varieties, none tasting like (or trying to taste like) a beef burger. They are good in their own right.

I can’t say the same for tofu “hot-dogs.” I’ve yet to taste one that wasn’t insipid, limp and rubbery. In that sense, I guess they do remind me of the real thing. I’ll pass either way.

So it was with some trepidation that I considered a recipe for spaghetti carbonara, which loosely translated from Italian means pasta with gobs of animal products.

Ready? Boil pasta, then toss it and a bit of its cooking water with raw eggs, a bunch of cooked bacon, a mess of grated Parmesan cheese and — in case that wasn’t enough saturated fat — a hefty slosh of half-and-half."

Includes recipe for:

Pasta Carbonara

Full article here.