Spaghetti Carbonara

Carbonara is one of my favorite Italian dishes but with all that cream and parmesan cheese it really packs in the calories, which is why I would usually avoid it unless I was eating out.  Until I found this recipe on the Philadelphia Cream Cheese website. You get the same creamy taste but with much less calories.  I also like to swap the regular spaghetti for wholemeal spaghetti and add in a couple of handfuls of chopped button mushrooms when frying the bacon. This is a firm favourite in our house.

Carbonara is also a great way to use up egg yolks. I had some left over from a healthy low fat feta cheese egg white omelette I’d made for lunch a few days earlier. I just froze the egg yolks and took them out the freezer the night before I needed them. They tend to get a bit lumpy once defrosted but this is fine! I’ve read that adding a small amount of salt or sugar to the yolks before freezing stops this. So you’d use salt for savoury sauces and sugar for custards etc. I’ll try this next time and let you know how it goes!

A quick shot of what I used (Angel Hair Pasta, not pictured, was my choice of pasta last night)

Here’s the original recipe

http://www.philadelphia.co.uk/Recipes/Spaghetti-Carbonara?r=9295

 

Cheesy potato skins

Finger food really is great, you can have so many of your favorite things in one sitting without feeling like you’ve been sat at an all you can eat Las Vegas buffet. I regularly do these if we have guests coming round for nibbles as all the prep work can be done beforehand and then you can just bung them in the oven to heat through once you’re getting hungry, leaving you to enjoy a nice cold glass of wine. I digress, back to the food! In this case, we fired up the BBQ for the first time in our new home and I just had to make some of these yummy gooey potato skins to pop on the coals.

 

All you’ll need is

 

Baked potatoes (enough to serve everyone who’s eating)

Butter (you’ll need a small chunk to help blend the ingredients)

Cheese, grated, I used 50g with 3 small potatoes but use as much or as little as you like, it all depends on how much you like cheese!

Onion, roughly chopped, I used half for the two of us but again, it depends how much you like it

Bacon lardon, I used about 40g for two servings

Salt and pepper

Clean and pierce the potatoes and bake in the oven as you would a baked potatoes. Leave until cool enough to handle. This next bit is easier to do if the potatoes are still slightly warm. Cut in half and scoop out the filling taking care not to tear the skins. Roughly mash the potatoes with the other ingredients and spoon it all back into the skins. At this point you can either leave to cool and refrigerate over night or wrap and pop them in the freezer but if you want them now, stick them straight into the oven at 180 degrees for about 15 minutes or until the tops go golden, or, as we did last night, wrap them individually in foil and pop them on the BBQ until they’re nice and hot.

 

 

Cheddar and onion is one my favorite flavor combinations but it’s so easy to experiment, last night I did a mix of Cheddar, onion and bacon and Stilton, bacon and onion, you could also try adding spring onions, salad peppers, sweet corn or even baked beans for the kids!

I’m back!!

It’s sadly been quite some time since I’ve been able to put a decent amount of time into Sip Chomp Chew.

In the past few months we’ve relocated, with Pug in tow, to Singapore. After visiting family in the UK before the big move and then living in a temporary apartment that was very difficult to cook in (they didn’t even provide a sieve!) I am finally reunited with my own kitchen equipment in our new home – I am so happy to start cooking again I can’t even begin to tell you!

In the mean time I’ve been writing up lots of my recipes, all I need now is to get cooking so I can take some photos for you to feast your eyes on. I’ll keep you posted 🙂