Pasta Carbanara

Pasta Carbanara

This is the French starving-student recipe that I lived on when I was in France. We must have had this at least once a week. It's kind of backwards in the sense that I can usually take a complex, healthy recipe and turn it into a quick, less healthy one; with this one, though, feel free to do the reverse. Use real onion instead of fried or dried. Tomato paste or sauce instead of ketchup. Milk instead of cream? No, maybe not. But really. The possibilities are endless.

Ingredients:

• As much bacon as you want, cut into small pieces.
• About 3/4 cup heavy cream
  
• Ketchup
• Soy sauce
• Cayenne pepper
  
• Onion in some form
• White wine
• Flour for thickening
• Pepper

Cook down the bacon and get rid of most of the grease. If you're using fresh onion, add it now and cook until tender. Dump in the cream, then a few squirts of ketchup, a dash of cayenne pepper, and a splash of soy sauce, as well as the dried or fried onion if you're using that instead. I usually heat the white wine in the microwave and use it to make a paste with a couple tbsp of flour, then dump that in. Season with pepper. You probably won't need salt.

Serve over the pasta that you didn't forget to make (you wouldn't do that, would you?) and enjoy.