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Main Dish

The delicious smell of this dish will ‘bacon’ everyone to your kitchen

This buttery bacon and peas pasta is a great summer meal, with tons of flavor without feeling super heavy. Serve it alongside some summer veggies, and it’s a delicious dish to put on the table for a hot day.

“Lindsey, you don’t have to cook. I would have DoorDashed something for lunch,” our young, Gen Z houseguest told me as I fired up my stove this week.

I mean, yeah, I guess I could have let him do that, but where’s the fun in eating lukewarm fast food in your own home when you have a new person to try a recipe out on?

I assured him that not only did I not mind cooking, but he was about to become one in a long line of my guinea pigs for new recipes. He didn’t argue with me too much.

As I flipped through my possible meal choices, I knew I wanted to stick to something that was filling without feeling overly heavy and definitely something that avoided preheating my oven, if I could help it.

I landed on a pasta dish that, while certainly not light by calorie or flavor standards, really fit the bill for lunch on a hot day, and it even sported just a little bit of green veggies so we could pretend we weren’t eating copious amounts of delicious butter and bacon sauce.

This recipe comes from the blog “Serving Dumplings” by Anna Chwistek. You can find her original post at https://www.servingdumplings.com/recipe/orecchiette-with-crispy-pancetta-and-peas/. I added extra seasoning in my version below, along with changing up some of the amounts of other ingredients.

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Buttery Bacon and Peas Pasta

This buttery bacon and peas pasta is a great summer meal, with tons of flavor without feeling super heavy. Serve it alongside some summer veggies, and it’s a delicious dish to put on the table for a hot day.
Course Main Course
Keyword bacon, bread crumbs, butter, frozen peas, garlic, minced garlic, orecchiette, pancetta, panko, parmesan, parmesan cheese, parsley, peas, red pepper flakes, summer lunch, summer pasta, thick-cut bacon, thick-sliced bacon

Ingredients

Pasta Ingredients

  • 16 ounces orecchiette pasta or another small pasta shape
  • 2 tablespoons butter
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 12 ounces thick-sliced bacon or pancetta diced
  • 6 to 8 cloves garlic minced
  • 12 ounces frozen peas
  • 1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
  • salt and pepper to taste
  • 1/4 cup parmesan freshly grated

Topping Ingredients

  • 3 tablespoons olive oil
  • 1/4 cup panko
  • 1/2 teaspoon dried parsley
  • 3-4 tablespoons parmesan freshly grated
  • salt and pepper to taste

Instructions

  • Cook the pasta according to package instructions, saving about 1/2 cup of the cooking liquid when you drain it.
  • While the pasta cooks, prepare the topping. Heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Once the oil is hot, stir in the panko, and stir continuously, sauteing for several minutes until the panko is golden brown.
  • Transfer the panko to a bowl and stir in the parsley, parmesan, salt and pepper. Set it aside.
  • In the same large skillet, begin preparing the pasta part of the dish by heating the olive oil and butter over medium heat.
  • Add the diced bacon and saute until it’s cooked through. Add the garlic and saute for another minute and then add in the frozen peas, red pepper flakes, salt and pepper. Stir occasionally, letting the peas thaw and everything meld for about three or four minutes.
  • Add in the cooked orecchiette, parmesan and about half of the reserved cooking water. Stir until everything is well coated and the cheese is melted. If you need a little more liquid, use the rest of the water. This will not be a thick, creamy sauce. Instead, you’ll have a light, delicious coating.
  • Serve the pasta hot, with a nice sprinkling of the panko mixture on top.

Like I said, this is decidedly not a healthy recipe (you’ll notice that none of the bacon fat is drained off, for instance), but it was really, really good, and our teenage visitor even went back for seconds.

The flavor of the bacon and butter, alongside the brightness from the peas was a great summer lunch. I also paired it with a simple side of sauteed zucchini and summer squash to try to get a few vitamins into our lives.

It is a little on the drier side when you reheat this, but I didn’t mind it. If that’s not really your cup of tea, you could always melt a little more butter to stir into it when you eat it for leftovers.

I would say making a from-scratch meal is certainly not as easy as firing up Door Dash, but I don’t think any of us would have gotten a meal like that from an app.

This piece first appeared in print on July 4, 2024.

Spice Up Your Life is a weekly newspaper column written by Lindsey Young in south central Kansas. If you are interested in sponsoring this column, please contact us through the “Contact Lindsey” link at the top of the page.

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Main Dish Side Dish

Huge casserole will make you say, ‘Cheese, Louise!’

This over-the-top version of macaroni and cheese makes a huge amount of the creamy, decadent dish.

As the extremely proud aunt of a fantastic three-year-old, I have been around for quite a few meals of macaroni and cheese the past several years.

I definitely can’t argue with her taste in good food. Joey makes fun of me for ordering mac and cheese regularly, and while my niece’s dish of choice is generally a cup of the single-serving microwaveable kind, I tend to opt for a more grown up version.

After I recently saw a recipe online for a batch that claimed to be the “world’s best” and featured three types of cheese, I decided to forgo any boxes of Kraft and try my own version from scratch.

I will warn you, before we even launch into this, that this makes an absolutely huge dish of macaroni and cheese. I would highly recommend halving or even quartering the recipe if you aren’t feeding a crowd or don’t want a lot of leftovers.

The recipe I used comes from the blog “Mom on Timeout.” You can find the original post at https://www.momontimeout.com/best-homemade-baked-mac-and-cheese-recipe/. I ended up adding extra pasta to my version, because it was way too soupy for my tastes. I also added garlic powder and extra paprika.

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Over-the-Top Macaroni and Cheese

This over-the-top version of macaroni and cheese makes a huge amount of the creamy, decadent dish.
Course Main Course
Keyword garlic, gruyere, macaroni, panko, parmesan, sharp cheddar cheese

Ingredients

  • 24 ounces elbow macaroni cooked al dente
  • 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
  • 6 tablespoons butter
  • 1/3 cup flour
  • 3 cups milk
  • 1 cup heavy whipping cream
  • 1 teaspoon garlic powder
  • salt and pepper to taste
  • 4 cups sharp cheddar shredded
  • 2 cups gruyere shredded
  • 1 1/2 cups panko crumbs
  • 4 tablespoons butter melted
  • 1/2 cup parmesan shredded
  • 1/2 teaspoon paprika

Instructions

  • Preheat the oven to 350. Spray a three- or four-quart baking dish with cooking spray.
  • While the pasta cooks, combine the shredded cheddar and Gruyere in a large bowl and set it aside.
  • When the pasta is finished and drained, add it to another bowl and drizzle it with the olive oil and mix to combine. Set it aside.
  • In a large pot or Dutch oven, melt six tablespoons of butter over medium heat. Whisk in the flour, and continue to stir for one minute. Whisk in the milk and heavy cream until the mixture is smooth. Continue stirring regularly until small bubbles start to form on the surface. Whisk in the salt, pepper and garlic powder and continue cooking, stirring regularly, for about two more minutes. Reserve two cups of the combined cheddar and gruyere, and add the rest to the pot, a handful at a time, whisking in between additions until the sauce is smooth. Once all of the cheese is melted into the sauce, add the pasta. Stir to fully coat the pasta and dump half of it into the prepared baking dish.
  • Add the rest of the cheddar and gruyere in an even layer and then top with the rest of the macaroni mixture.
  • In a bowl, combine the panko, parmesan, four tablespoons melted butter and paprika, and stir until all of the bread crumbs are moistened.
  • Sprinkle the bread crumb mixture on the top of the dish and bake for 30 minutes or until the topping is browned and the cheese is bubbling.

This was so rich and really delicious, and while gruyere is not a cheap cheese to buy, it really did add some complex flavors I wouldn’t have been able to get with just the sharp cheddar.

Two things I would add as tips are, first, you might want to bake this on a baking sheet in case it spills over. My baking dish was just over three quarts in size, and I could barely fit the entire batch into it.

Second, if you want the best results, shred the cheddar and gruyere yourself. Pre-packaged shredded cheese often doesn’t melt as easily because of additives put in to keep it from clumping together.

I was amazed at the size of this batch of macaroni and cheese by the time I was done. I ended up giving away quite a few helpings so that it would all get eaten.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to enjoy this one with my niece. We’ll have to have a mac and cheese date sometime soon; although, I suspect that my use of “fancy” cheese won’t impress her too much and with her three-year-old appetite, we’re bound to have a lot of leftovers.

This piece first appeared in print on April 22, 2021.

Spice Up Your Life is a weekly newspaper column written by Lindsey Young in south central Kansas. If you are interested in sponsoring this column, please contact us through the “Contact Lindsey” link at the top of the page.

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