Pea and Pancetta Spaghetti

Thankfully due to the nice soul over at In Search of Heston, you can find lots of Heston dishes online, helpfully indexed (even if some are behind a pay wall - boohiss.)

This is where I found another one of Heston's Waitrose dishes - Pea and Pancetta Spaghetti. And since it's online I can link to the recipe. Linketty link. I am going to have to go visit a Waitrose in London, just so I can see all these Heston linked meals...

I found this recipe interesting because it is very similar for my go-to Spaghetti Carbonara recipe from Jill Dupliex's Old Food.(Which is one of my three desert island cookbooks).

So anyway, it's an easy, midweek kind of dish. The kind of midweek dish that you cook when you're tired, potentially making blurry photos. Sorry about that.

Pea and Pancetta Spaghetti

Steps

1. Cook your pasta
2. Cook your onion and garlic
3. Whisk together egg yolks, parmesan etc
4. add the peas to the onions
5. Mix onions/peas and egg yolk mix to hot pasta
6. Stir through and serve!

It's like the laziest Heston ever. I feel like I've been saying that a lot. I obviously need to get on to the harder dishes again. Let's watch it happen.

Gather yon ingredients.

Prepare yon ingredients.

Cook the onion etc.

Cook the olive oil, onion, garlic. Plus chilli if your family eats chili. Sadly, mine doesn't.

Add and cook the pancetta. Smells tasty. Salty italian bacon stuff.

 

 Get your sauce sorted.

 So this is parmesan, egg yolks, salt and pepper. Sounds like my spaghetti carbonara.

 But instead of cream, you add a ladel of the cooking water from the pasta. And whisk it up.

Add your peas to defrost in the pancetta and onion mix.

Drain your spaghetti

And back into the still hot saucepan.

 Then add in the meat and veg. Mix.

And stir through the egg yolk mixture.

You might be worried about the raw egg. Fear not, the heat from the pasta very quickly cooks the egg into a thick sauce. (I was totally chill, having seen this trick before on my carbonara).

Serve and garnish with more parmesan.

Eat with gusto.

Guest opinions:

• The family liked it. Daughter is not difficult to please on this front. It has pasta and a bacon variant so always likely to be a winner from her. Husband liked it but not hugely whelmed. I think he preferred my usual Carbonara, which is a favourite of his. (Which is pretty much this with bacon in place of pancetta, no peas and a smaller amount of cream in place of the water).
• My thoughts was it was a good go-to easy recipe probably mildly healthier than the usual. I would probably make it again, but might down grade the amount of pancetta, which I found a little salty and overpowering in this quantity. Which may depend on the pancetta you use of course.

Verdict

I'd probably make this again. It would be a tasty and easy little entree (or 'il primo'... I've been getting ready for my trip).

Tasty and very low effort. I think its worth getting the better ingredients for this one if possible - one of those Italian things of 'simple done well'.