All Topics, Lifestyle
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Pasta is one of my favourite foods of all time and the perfect carb based dinner for the colder months. I’m no chef, but since I stopped eating beef earlier this year, I’ve been experimenting more with different pasta. Spaghetti carbonara, chicken and pesto penne, creamy tagliatelle.. the list goes on. Today I thought I’d share how I make a quick and easy midweek meal of Spaghetti Carbonara.
I have one thing to thank for the speed and the ease of this dish and thats the Schwartz Spaghetti Carbonara Mix. Just add it to milk, mushrooms and bacon for the sauce and cook up some spaghetti. Yes, it really is that easy, but here’s the step-by-step:
Cook some spaghetti (275g according to the recipe but I won’t tell if you do extra). Fry up a pack of diced bacon, then add around 175g of finely sliced mushrooms and continue to fry for a couple of minutes. In the same pan, add the sachet and 450ml of semi-skimmed milk and bring to the boil. Then add the spaghetti from earlier, when it comes to cooking, timings are my downfall so use your own common sense here please. Heat this through for a couple of minutes and you’re finito.
Serves: 4
Serve with: Garlic bread and a nice white (optional).
I’ll admit to being a bit of a food snob. In the past I’ve always preferred to cook from scratch, at least, as far as my culinary skills have allowed. When I’m blessed with spare time, I still like to experiment with recipes, but at the minute, quick and easy is ideal. It’s the perfect compromise, because by working with fresh ingredients, the quality remains high and the dish tastes great. No seriously, its better than some of the pasta dishes I’ve had at Italian chain restaurants (if I do say so myself). I don’t think any pasta I ever make will compare to the pasta we ate in Rome, but I digress.
I’ve also grown to love cooking in this way because it allows almost the same flexibility as cooking from scratch. Vegetarian? Don’t add the bacon. Don’t like mushrooms? Leave them out. The spaghetti carbonara mix makes for a great base of a dish, but the recipe provided is really just a guideline which can be edited to taste. For example, it works really well with chicken as either an addition or alternative to the bacon.
You can probably tell that I’m not an overly methodic chef, but I love flexibility, playing around with pairings and using up things that are already in the fridge.
If you enjoyed this post or found it helpful then please do let me know so that I can work on letting you in on some of my other go-to meals.
* Schwartz have gifted me this product and this post is part of a paid collaboration. As always, all words, images and opinions are my own. Please read my full disclaimer for more information.
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