• Recipes
• Second course
• Roast
• Roasted tomato and leek carbonara

Roasting

So we’ve all heard the stupid, Sunday comics joke about carbonara/alfredo: “it’s just like mac & cheese for adults!” Har har, roll laugh track, throw pie, etc. <br /> <br />And yeah, after you get past the “gee golly, isn’t that just a hoot and a holler” moment, you realize that they’re pretty much full of shit. Carbonara and Mac & Cheese are NOTHING alike, unless you consider having pasta and cheese enough to qualify for “alike”. In that case, a plate of lasagna is the same thing as that horrible gray pasta salad I had forced down my throat at last weekend’s bbq. <br /> <br />No, they’re way the hell different, and not just because of the ingredients, but because of the method. Mac & Cheese, for all of its creamy deliciousness, is pretty much just slapping cheese in a pot and adding cream and pasta. No fanfare, no moment of culinary creation, just stir and stir and plop: food. Really good food, but still. There’s no art to it. <br /> <br />Carbonara, on the other hand, has that moment. It’s the moment when you slowly pour the raw eggs and cheese into the pasta and stir, and watch everything go from a pile of gross to a piece of sublimity, of pasta-borne perfection, in seconds. Maybe I’m romanticizing it a bit, but hey, that’s the whole point, isn’t it? Take something misunderstood and misappreciated and make love to it. And that’s exactly what we’re gonna do here: make something that’s a hell of a lot more than just “grown-up Mac & Cheese”. <br /> <br />And then make love to it. <br /> <br />(Don’t actually put your genitals near hot pasta, I don’t need a lawsuit coming my way from you idiots)

Oct. 1, 2021, 11:50 a.m.

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