My husband is the cook in our family. He puts in a long day at the office, often grocery shops on his way home, cooks a creative and delicious dinner for four, and cleans it all up. Yeah, I know. I’m totally spoiled. Or he’s totally whipped. Probably both.
Once in awhile Pinterest makes me think I can cook. Or it makes me think that I want to hope that I can try to cook. I really don’t like cooking. I can never get the timing right. There are so many things to do at once and, bing!, my phone interrupts me with some text or email, I get distracted, and I end up burning something. But, occasionally, I want to help my husband out by at least attempting to cook dinner.
I even took a knife skills class at Central Market last year to reassure my husband that  I could safely prep for him in the kitchen without slicing my wrists open. Check out these not-at-all-professionally chopped veggies. Dude, I cut like a Boss. And HEB Spaghetti? I use local ingredients. LOL.
Last night I tried a Creamy Bacon Carbonara recipe from Get Off Your Butt and Bake (the pin is here). It looked easy and tasty. But, it required me to cook bacon, something I’d never done. I called my husband at the office, told him about the recipe, and asked him how to cook bacon.
He prefers to line a large cookie sheet with foil, lay strips of bacon on it, and bake it at 400 degrees for about 20-30 minutes, then drain the grease off. It’s an easy, splatter-free way to cook bacon. By the time the bacon was almost done, he was home to guide me through the rest of the recipe. Yes, I need help even with a simple recipe like this one, folks. I’m a true illiterate in the kitchen. The eating? Makes so much sense. The cooking? Less so.
The blog post from Get Off Your Butt and Bake has a lot of comments from people who adapted the recipe and who also gave tips and hints to make it better. The original author said she doubled the sauce to have enough to match the pasta so I did too. I used four eggs instead of two. I used a 1/2 cup of half and half instead of 1/4 cup of heavy cream.
I also ended up adding quite a bit of pasta water to both temper the egg mixture (Can you believe I know what “tempering” means? Admit it. You’re starting to be impressed.) before adding it to the pasta, and to thin the resulting sauce a bit. We skipped the mushrooms and my husband and I added the pepper flakes to our servings at the table as our kids haven’t yet developed heat-loving palates like ours.
The resulting dish was UH-MAZ-ING. It was delicious, rich (but not too rich), and filling. We served it with crusty ciabatta bread and fresh, organic green beans on the side.
Next time I’ll only use two eggs and substitute whole milk instead of half and half to bring the fat content down even more. OK, it sounds like I know what I’m doing and I’ve turned into a cook. Not true. Admission: those are my husband’s brilliant ideas. I’m totally stealing them.
The recipe is relatively easy, even for a cook as inexperienced and inept as me! And, it’s one you can add to: chicken, shrimp, tofu would all be great additions to this dish.
Pin Tested: San Antonio Mom Blogs approved!
