Yuletide Pasta!

The Christmas season bodes much for people all around the globe. Where this celebration was once the sole property of the follwers of Christ, it has since the evolution of marketing and consumerism become a festival for the masses. Statistically speaking, Christmas season sees a sudden hike in suicide rates (courtesy of Hallmark where their many images of warm gregarious Christmas gatherings have spiked the depression level of those without) as well as a ginourmous hike in consumerism. Proof of love and goodwill, in the here and now, is typified by displays of the power of the dollar (read: the more expensive or larger the gift, or the more glamorous the package in which it comes, the more you mean to me). Gone were the days when Christmas was celebrated amongst friends and family with good, filling home cooked food, piping hot drinks, songs and movies.

As such, no one can blame me for trying to re-invoke the good, old feeling that Christmas once was, before Santa discovered Fed-ex and before the mention of elves evoked images of emaciated children slaving away in freezing sweatshops in impoverished third-world countries. This I accomplished by attempting, for the first time ever to make, yes, MAKE, fresh herb pasta served ala carbonara.

The pasta kit: Just add water and voila!! An instant Italian classic!! (I wish)

I got the instructions for this preparation off of the telly and yes, it's Nigella Lawson. Though she may raise derision from 'real' chefs such as my sister who's in cooking school and has picked up all the airs of high-falutin cuisine making <puh, zees pasta est le magnifique!>, I find her style of cooking: her lazy,roughly-chop-up-your-ingredients-with-a-funny-looking-knife and chuck-it-all-into-a-pot-then-look-pretty brand of cooking anyway, to be amazingly unpretentious if not unrefined. Under her persuasive and most attractive instruction, I gradually combined five eggs with 400 grams of plain flour. Although she recommended one egg for each hundred grams of flour, I found my dough too stiff even after four eggs, hence the fifth.

Behold the restive yawn of Mt. Hypertension brimming with hot, molten cholestrol.

Italian cooking has often, to me anyway, brought my mind back to movies featuring comfortably fat Italian women elbow deep in flour yakking away as she cooked to her gang of aunty-aunties as she gradually moistened her dough with the occasional spray of saliva. That's the fantasy. Without the trappings of modern technology so abundant in so many kitchens that we see on the tube, I found myself in a veritable workout as I gradually worked the eggs into the flour and begun kneading it into a 'smooth, pliable dough'. Oh, and since it was going to be herbed pasta after all, I finely (well, as fine as i can make it) chopped English parsley and dumped that in into the eggs before making the dough (you might want to make sure that the leaves are quite dry as any added moisture might result in a gluggy dough and eventually, soggy pasta.

Momma told me looking at green stuff is good for the eyes. Dunno bout you but the high screen contrast on my monitor's giving me a headache.

Once the flour and eggs have all incorporated themselves into one another, you need to knead it out the way you do bread dough. With theheel of your hand, press the dough out away from you and bring it back in. Repeat ad drenched in sweat until the dough is smooth, pliable and elastic. Of course, if you were like everyone else and had a food processor, your life would be a whole bunch easier.

Ah, I like the smell of raw dough and parsley in the morning.
See the tendons in my forearm? Pasta making is NOT for the wimpy. Unless you have a food processor: which makes me an idiot with too much time and energy.

In addition to muscling my way to the perfect pasta dough, I also had to muscle my way into turning the dough into strips of pasta. In a perfect world, I'd have one of those pasta or pan-me rolly, rolly machines. Again, that would've made my life a whole lot happier (I'll write to Santa for one next year). Without that however, I rolled the dough out into a thin, thin sheet with a floured makeshift rolling pin (see? I don't even have one of those. Instead, I had to improvise with a glass bottle) and sliced it into thin, thin strips all dusted with flour to prevent them from re-congregating back into dough when my back was turned.

The one upside of NOT having a paster roller? You can make any shape pasta you want! Fussilli, farfalle, gnochi, spaghetti, wan than mee, hor fun... the possibilities are endless.

With the preparation of the pasta done, I turned my attention towards making the pasta to serve. Once again, this recipe is one of Nigella's (I'm kinda addicted to her and her cooking no? Or maybe it's just her, I dunno). For creamless carbonara (totally NOT an oxymoron as you'll see), all you need to do is dash into hot pasta three eggs that have been lightly beaten with about 200grams of cheese. Now Nigella recommended grated parmesan but all we couild find was grated mozarella, whcih worked out fine in the end.

As the actual cooking of this dish was quite rapid and my housemate had her hands full of soap suds, I did not manage to capture the motions. I can still recount it though. I sauteed minced garlic and onion in a heavy pan with olive oil (grade not important) and I sprinkled salt over the roots as they were sauteeing so that they would only soften and caramelise but not brown.

That done, I threw in a load of finely chopped bacon chips (again, Nigella recommended panchetta which is just basically rindless bacon but I'm not that particular) and stirred the lot around for a bit to get them nice and hot. I followed this with reconstituted mushrooms (you could use fresh ones but they're damn expensive) and shrimps. At this point, you might want to begin cooking the pasta in salted water at a rolling boil.

As soon as (note this: AS SOON AS) the shrimp have JUST started curling up and are turning a delicate shade of pink, remove your pan from the heat, dump the whole lot into the piping hot pasta (drained of course: fresh pasta cooks a lot quicker than dried ones so keep an eye out for them), give it a good stir and dash in your egg/cheese mixture and start mixing as if your life depended on it. You want to coat everything in the pot with the mixture (and don't wory about salmonella, if your pasta was completely hot, the egg should cook through and still retain it's creaminess) and you should stir and stir and stir so that the egg does not scramble instead.

Never again will you need to go to Italiannies. This is just as good and much cheaper too.

If you find that, in the end, the pasta looks a little too dry (I didn't), just pour in a little of the pasta water or the mushroom water or alternatively some white wine or stock. Again, the manner of making it moist is completely up to you and this is, in my opinion, the best part about the Nigella experience. There is a complete lack of rigid rules and you can do just about whatever as long as your bases are covered.

p.s. Out of the entire pasta dough yielded from the measurements I used, I only used half of the dough produced to make a gigantic meal. I believe if you were to use ALL of the dough, you'd have a turreenful to feed a good-sized part of five. Of course, then you'd need to double the amount of eggs/cheese and aromatics needed for the preparation. Dole it out onto stoneware china, garnish with a sprig of parsley (my policy is to never EVER mix herbs as you want to showcase the flavour of just one particular herb instead of confusing the palate with a smorgasboard of aromas) and I'm telling you, it's one mighty impressive looking dish to impress dinner guests with.