Chicken Carbonara

I've found a new favorite way to use leftover chicken.



Sometimes I'll have leftovers from a roasted chicken in the grocery store, from a restaurant, or in this case, from a chicken I roasted at home using this method. After the initial chicken meal there are many things I like to do with the leftover meat -- enchiladas, salad, quesadillas, etc. But I think this chicken carbonara is definitely my new favorite. The rich, creamy Alfredo-esque sauce with slight smokiness from the bacon and the heartiness of the chicken makes this spaghetti dish absolutely no one's leftovers. (However, this dish itself doesn't actually make for good leftovers -- cream sauces rarely do. Reheating will make it separate, so you should eat whatever you make right then and there!)

I was inspired by this video, in which Giada De Laurentiis shares her recipe for chicken carbonara, but I adjusted it to a) serve 2 rather than what looks like an army; b) use slightly less cream to save on calories; and c) use bacon rather than pancetta, which is easier to acquire and less costly as well.



Chicken Carbonara

Serves 2

Ingredients

• 8oz dried spaghetti
• 1 cup cooked chicken, chopped
• 2 slices of strip bacon, chopped
• 1 clove of garlic, minced
• 2 egg yolks
• 1/2 cup regular or heavy whipping cream (or use 3/4 cup of cream and skip the whole milk)
• 1/4 cup whole milk
• 1/2 cup parmesan cheese, grated
• 1 tbsp fresh parsley, chopped
• salt to taste

Method

1. Start boiling water with some salt to make the pasta as the package directs. Cook pasta until just before al dente -- it will be cooked a little more in the sauce, so you don't want to overcook or it'll become too soft.
2. In a medium saucepan with a heavy bottom, start frying the bacon. When nearly crisp, add the garlic and saute together for a minute, until the bacon is crisp. Remove from heat.
3. In a medium-sized bowl, whisk together the egg yolks. Add the whipping cream, milk, cheese, and parsley. Stir until combined.
4. When the pasta is almost ready, place the pan with the bacon mixture back onto low to medium heat. Add the chicken.
5. Using tongs or similar, add the cooked spaghetti directly on top of the chicken, without straining. The pasta water it brings over is good, as it's starchy and will help with thickening the sauce.
6. Pour the cream mixture into the pan with the spaghetti. Gently mix everything together, until the sauce has thickened (this will go a LOT faster if you use heavy whipping cream; if you don't, just be patient, it WILL thicken) and the meat is well distributed. Do NOT heat so high that the sauce boils; this will cause it to separate and will be pretty much disgusting and inedible.
7. Taste it; you may find that the salt from the bacon is enough to season the dish. If not, use salt to taste.

Note: Giada serves her carbonara with some crushed walnut sprinkled over the top; this is intriguing but I haven't yet tried it.

Failed Alfredo

Sometimes my cooking experiments are complete failures. Such was the case with my first attempt ever at an alfredo sauce from scratch. I hadn't done much research -- I was just following a recipe that'd been posted on LJ -- and didn't know the cardinal rule for making alfredo sauce: don't let it boil. If you let it boil, it separates, creating butter and fat solids, and is basically unsalvagable after that.



In the above picture, it was still in the very early 'warming up' stages, so it looks fine. If only I'd kept it there, I would have been okay. But I thought that it needed to bubble a little more, so I turned up the heat and brought it to a boil. Big mistake. Sigh. I added in the parmesan cheese at the end anyway, hoping that it would somehow save it (it didn't). I ended up drizzling my pasta with some of the 'sauce' anyway, and the flavor was super delicious. I can only imagine how good it would have been if the texture and consistency had been right.

The good news is, I've discovered a great linguine from Trader Joe's. They have different kinds of linguine, and I give a big thumbs up to the garlic and basil one. (I bought another kind also, but can't remember the type, and in any case haven't tried it yet.)



There's the packaging for it. It does cost quite a bit more than the regular pasta ($1.99 for 8 oz., when you can get twice that of the plain kind for $0.99 -- however at this particular TJ's I couldn't find any plain long pasta except for spaghetti and angel hair), but it's quite good.



Here it is cooked, a bit past al dente as I was so busy trying to save the sauce that I left the pasta boiling a little too long.