If you're a fan of carbonara pasta then this is the recipe for you. It's ridiculously easy to prepare and even easier to wolf down. Sure it's not the healthiest of pasta meals, using cream, bacon and plenty of carb loading pasta, but it's jam packed with flavour and also, in this case packed with vegetables. The cream works out to be only 1/4 of a cup per person, that's nothing! And as for the bacon, you'd probably eat more in your Sunday morning fry up.
So when you think about it - it's actually really healthy.
Honest.
Ingredients (serves 4):
- 200 grams lean free range bacon, diced
- 400 grams button mushrooms, thickly sliced
- 4 cloves of garlic, crushed
- 2 egg yolks, lightly beaten
- 1 cup of cream
- 2 spring onion, thickly sliced
- 1/2 cup of parsley, finely chopped
- 1/4 cup grated parmesan
- 400 grams of pappardelle pasta (spaghetti or fettucine would also be suitable)
- 1 cup of frozen peas
- olive oil for cooking
Prepare your vegetables first, as the rest of the meal doesn't take long to cook and assemble.
Put a good lug of olive oil in a large frying pan, and cook the bacon for 5-8 minutes, stirring on a medium heat till lightly browned. Remove from the fry pan and set aside.
In the same pan, add another generous lug of olive oil and cook the mushrooms, stirring for 5 minutes, till they are softened and starting to shrink down. The juice from the mushrooms will help you to get any sticky bacon bits from the bottom of the pan. Next add the garlic and at least a teaspoon of cracked pepper and cook for another 2 minutes. Set aside with the bacon. Do not rinse the pan - we'll use it again later.
Meanwhile boil your pasta in a large pot of heavily salted water - I usually add at least 1 tbsp of salt to the cooking water. For the last four minutes of cooking, add the frozen peas. Before you drain the water, scoop half a cup of the cooking liquid into the fry pan which you cooked the bacon and mushroom. Drain the pasta and peas, then pop them into the frying pan.
Turn the frying pan onto a medium heat and add the bacon and mushrooms along with the spring onion, cream and beaten egg yolks. Work quickly to toss everything together. After a couple of minutes you'll see it start to thicken. Now remove from the heat and stir through the parsley and parmesan cheese.
Use tongs to ladle the pasta into serving bowls. Sprinkle with extra parsley and parmesan if desired.
After a weekend home to Gisborne for a 21st I came back with a chilly bin full of food again as always. Not only do I love the hospitality of this, but it inspires me to try new things in the kitchen. This times hoard was a box of chilli peppers, two flounder, and as per the title of this blogpost, two wild ducks.
These ducks had been lovingly cooked and prepared during the 21st celebrations as part of the hangi with thyme rosemary and salt. The duck cooked in the hangi was glorious. In fact with all the offerings on the table, this was the only meat that I ate as it was so good. Therefore I was honoured to be sent home with two ducks.
The ducks had been corned, similar to corned beef, but with duck. Meaning that it had been brined in a mixture of salt, sugar and spice for 5 days. In saying that I think that you could use regular wild or farmed duck in this recipe, but would need to salt to taste. You'll note that I didn't add any extra salt to the recipe, neither was the flavour of the salt and spice overwhelming. In fact, it worked very well with what could otherwise be a very rich gamey meat.
So, after being gifted such beautiful meat I needed to do some research on how I might go about cooking it. As we are coming into the winter season I decided to make a hearty ragu dish. Thankfully I was not disappointed. Majority of my inspiration came from this recipe off Taste.com.au as I liked that it added chinese five spice, which I thought would work well with the duck, and it did. However, as always, I took my own spin on it and came up with this crowd pleasing number.
Ingredients
1tbsp olive, vegetable or coconut oil.
1 onion
2 carrots
2 celery stalks
handful of fresh rosemary
1 green capsicum
2 cloves of garlic
1 large red chilli
1 whole wild duck
1 cup of chicken stock
2 cans of diced tomato
1 tsp chinese five spice
Black pepper to taste
1/2c red wine
800g pappardelle
1/2 cup parmesan, to serve
bunch of basil leaves, to serve
olive oil, to serve
Method
- Dice onion, celery, carrot and capsicum, crush garlic and finely chop rosemary and chilli.
- In a heavy saucepan heat oil, add onion, celery and carrot. Saute over a medium heat, stirring till becoming translucent. After a couple of minutes, add the rosemary, capsicum and garlic, continue cooking for 3-5 minutes till softened.
- Remove from pan and place in slow cooker (alternatively you could use a casserole dish with a lid).
- Quarter duck and place in hot pan, skin side down, cook for 5-10 minutes till browned. Add to slow-cooker. Use chicken stock to deglaze the pan and loosen all the cooking juices. Add this to the slow cooker also, then put in the tomato, chinese five spice and pepper.
- Cover, turn on low and leave for 8-10 hours. (Alternatively cook in a low oven 120ยบ for 4 hours)
- After 8-10 hours, open the slow cooker and carefully remove pieces of duck (it will want to fall apart, but try and get it out whole as it has a lot of little bones).
- Place veges and remaining juices in a heavy saucepan and simmer on a med-high heat till liquid has completely reduced.
- Meanwhile, carefully go through duck and remove all bones and the skin, this is quite tedious, but the result is 2-3 cups of finely shredded beautifully tender duck meat.
- Once reduced, add 1/2 c red wine and continue to reduce.
- Meanwhile, bring a large pot of salted water to the boil and cook pasta according to packet directions. Once cooked, drain, drizzle a little olive oil, toss and serve onto plates.
- Top with a large ladle or two of duck ragu sauce, a sprinkling of grated parmesan cheese and a few basil leaves.
Of course, be sure to serve with crusty bread (to mop up any remaining juices) and more of the delicious red wine that you doused into the sauce.
