Pasta Carbonara for a really bad day

Today my external hard disk crashed on me. My whole life is in there - family photos, vacation snaps, music I painstakingly downloaded and freeloaded off a whole bunch of people, work stuff (including my past work), and all my financial trackings. On hindsight I don't know why I never bothered to back it up, and today I pay the price.

So as one can tell, I am NOT in a good mood today. And as per my recently acquired habit (no thanks to Nigella again), I make a creamy, hot, totally sinful comfort dish - pasta carbonara.

While the pasta is cooking, thick bacon fingers are slowly crisped in a hot pan (large enough to hold your pasta) with a drop of garlic-infused oil then set aside, finely sliced onions softened in the savoury fat followed by minced garlic and then a splash of white wine to deglaze. Let the bacony winey mixture bubble away to cook off the alcohol. Off with the heat now. Crack 2 eggs in a bowl, add about 3/4 cups of freshly grated parmesan and generous dash of freshly ground black pepper and a grating of nutmeg, and beat to combine. When the pasta is cooked, drain it (reserve a cupful of the cooking water) and toss into the aforesaid pan. Toss the mixture around in the pan juices, then slowly pour the egg parmesan mixture into the pasta, tossing the pasta around until you get a velvety sauce clinging to the pasta. Taste and see if you need anymore salt - with the bacon, the cheese and salted water the pasta was cooked in you probably don't, although I normally find myself adding a whole lot more pepper. Sprinkle with the bacon and chopped parsley and serve immediately.

One Wonderfully Hectic Weekend

Dead tired today after a full weekend of preparing for (Saturday) and then helping out in the Church food sale on Sunday.

Here's what I baked for the sale:

1) Martha Stewart's One-Bowl Chocolate Cupcakes - ironically this "one bowl" turned out to be the messiest of the lot, thanks to cocoa powder flying everywhere and cake batter dripping from my spoons when I scooped it into my cupcake casings

2) Dorie Greenspan's Perfection Pound Cake

I have to say - I used Golden Churn butter, fresh eggs from the market and my precious vanilla extract - made one 9 by 5 loaf and another mini loaf cake. Since I did not want to mar their beautiful forms I had to resist cutting us a slice. But I got lucky when the larger one refused to leave the loaf tin without leaving a bit of itself in the tin. So I tasted it - and man, that was actually wonderful. What with all the chocolate and the citrus flavoured cakes I was making, there is such joy in a plain and simple, vanilla-scented, piece of close-crumbed perfection. I did add a 3 tablespoons of plain milk to the batter though, cos I thought it would be a bit dry without it. No icing, no jam, no accessorising required when you have perfection

3) Mandarin Orange Crumb Cake
This was moist and citrusy on the bottom and crunchy on top, thanks to the roasted almonds in the crumb mixture. Also pretty good, but really, kind overshadowed by the grande old lady (the pound cake).

So I woke up at 5 in the morning on Sunday and did the following: ferry some one hundred litres of soymilk from various suppliers to the church, spooned ice and drinks into cups, hollered at customers to buy, and generally had lots of fun. Oh, and ate lots of food too - something like ten chicken wings in the span of a few hours, I was that hungry and the wings were that good.

All in all, a pretty wonderful weekend in Miri, I'd say :)