pasta

Tonight I wanted to make a vegetarian carbonara dish. The thing is that if you take pancetta (or baken) out of the equation it becomes really tricky to give it that distinct flavor and extra dimension that this simple dish needs. It becomes even trickier when you don’t like that much cream in your sauces – which I don’t.

So… I tried to experiment a bit and borrowed a bit from a Caesar salad type of dressing. I used a mix of zucchini and squash to give it a bit of texture, color and substance. I used anchovies and fresh herbs (one mint leaf, parsley, and thyme) in additional to the eggs for the sauce. I used just a dash of whole milk, but of the cream sauces out there go ahead and add more.

All in whole it was much better than I actually expected. You should not be concerned about the anchovies because you can’t really tell, but they do add the extra something I was looking for.