Fantastic summer dish.

Normal pasta carbonara is really good. I mean it’s pretty hard to go wrong with bacon, a creamy sauce, and good cheese. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be improved on! Especially in summer when there are so many delicious fresh veggies, it seems strange to make a meal without packing it full of veggies.

So that’s exactly what this recipe does. Not only does it happen to be delicious, but it’s also quick and easy! Start to finish is definitely under 30 minutes assuming you’re halfway competent with a knife.

Summer Vegetable Carbonara

Yield: Serves 4.

Prep Time: 20 minutes

Total Time: 30 minutes

Ingredients:

5-6 small to medium zucchini or squash
1 pound penne pasta
4 large egg yolks
1/2 Cup heavy cream
1/2 Cup Parmesan cheese, grated and divided
8 slices (or more if you want) of thick bacon
Few sprigs of fresh thyme
Salt and pepper
Drizzle of olive oil

Directions:

1) Chop your zucchini and fresh squash into half-circles about the size of the penne pasta. Also chop your bacon into cubes.

2) Whisk your egg yolks (save the whites for an omelet), cream, 1/4 Cup Parm, and a pinch of salt and pepper in a seperate bowl. Set aside for later.

3) Cook Penne according to box.

4) In a large pan with high sides, cook bacon over medium-high heat until very crispy and brown. Remove bacon from pan.

5) When your pasta is done, drain it and reserve about 1 Cup of cooking water.

6) Add veggies to the pan with the bacon grease along with a few thyme sprigs if you want and some salt and pepper.

7) Cook the veggies over medium-high heat for just a minute or two. Any longer than that and they'll get soggy and mushy.

8) Combine pasta with veggies and add your bacon back in.

9) Kill the heat and slowly add in your egg yolk mixture, stirring furiously while you add it. If you do this over the heat, your eggs will just cook, but they should into a creamy sauce if the pan isn't on direct heat.

10) If it looks dry, add a bit of reserved pasta water to make the sauce thicker.

11) Sprinkle carbonara with more cheese and serve immediately.

Adapted from Jamie at Home.

Prepping the Ingredients

Jamie starts his version of this dish by noting that it’s really important to get the best ingredients you can. I would definitely agree. If you can get some good thick bacon, really nice fresh eggs, and colorful summer veggies, this dish will be very good.

Good lookin' squashes

As far as prep goes, start by chopping up your bacon and veggies. When you’re chopping your zucchini and/or squash, try to chop them into about the size of the penne. It gives the dish a great texture if everything is roughly the same size.

Also, chop up your bacon into cubes.

Get everything ready...

The only other thing you need to prep before you get started cooking is the egg and cream mixture. Just combine your egg yolks (you can save the whites in the fridge for an omelet or something), cream, and about 1/4 Cup of Parm cheese in a bowl and whisk it together. Add a pinch of salt and pepper also.

The key to a good carbonara.

Making the Carbonara

This dish comes together pretty fast. The thing that takes the longest is probably boiling the water for the pasta actually. So be sure to get that started pretty early.

To start the carbonara though, add your bacon to a large pan preferably with high sides. Eventually everything will be in this one pan so use a big one. You might want to add a tiny drizzle of olive oil to the pan just to get the bacon cooking, but then the fat should render out pretty quickly.

You want the bacon to be browned and really crispy.

A little goes a long way.

The next step involves just a bit of timing. The trick with the veggies is to not overcook them. Squash and zucchini can get a bit mushy if you cook them for more than a few minutes. So ideally you would start them when your pasta is 2-3 minutes from being done.

When you’re ready, add all the veggies to your pan with a pinch of salt and pepper and a few sprigs of thyme if you want. Stir this all around so the veggies get coated nicely in all the bacon oil.

This will smell pretty delicious. You might have people knocking on your door.

Don't overcook these guys!

Finishing the Dish

The key to making a good carbonara is to make sure you don’t add the egg mixture to a super-hot pan otherwise it’ll just over-cook the eggs and you’ll have scrambled egg pasta. Scrambled egg pasta isn’t the best thing in the world.

So here’s how to work it. When your pasta is done, drain it and reserve about a cup of the cooking water from the pasta. I just ladle out a cup or so of liquid right before draining.

Then add your drained pasta straight to the pan with the veggies and bacon. Stir that all together really well so the pasta is mixed in with the veggies.

Next, turn off the heat. Then add all your egg mixture and start stirring! The residual heat from the pan and the pasta will be more than enough heat to cook the eggs, but it won’t cook them quickly so they’ll stay nice and creamy. If it looks a little dry, add back some of your pasta water. The starch from the water will help thicken the sauce and make it even creamier.

I added probably 1/2 Cup of pasta water back to my version. The key is to keep stirring once you add your egg mixture!

Creamy and delicious.

The only other trick to this meal is to eat it as soon as possible! Add on some of your leftover cheese right on the pasta as you serve it.

Yum.

Ideally, your veggies will still have a tiny bit of crunch to them, the bacon will be crispy and salty, and the sauce will be rich and creamy.

This is a really simple dish that can really impress!

Couple that with the cold weather and all signs point to pasta carbonara for me. It’s one of my favorite ways to prepare pasta. Instead of a tomato or cream sauce, pasta carbonara is basically just eggs that are stirred into cooked pasta. The eggs cook slowly and make a kind of creamy and delicious sauce.

To change up the normal, I used bowtie pasta for this and added some crispy bacon and sauteed leeks for even more flavor.

A kind of carbonara

There’s really nothing fancy about this dish and you could even strip away a lot of the ingredients I use if you wanted to simplify it even more. You could ditch the bacon and leeks and have a much more traditional pasta. A little cheese grated on top with maybe some chopped parsley and you’d still be in good shape.

Bowtie Pasta Carbonara with Bacon and Leeks

Yield: Serves 4.

Prep Time: 15 minutes

Total Time: 30 minutes

Ingredients:

1 pound bowtie pasta
4 strips bacon, diced
1 leek, diced
1/2 Teaspoon crushed red pepper (optional)
2 cloves garlic, minced
3 eggs, lightly beaten
Salt and pepper
Grated Parmesan
Chopped parsley

Directions:

1) Get water boiling for pasta. Salt it with 1 TBSP. salt per gallon of water. Cook pasta according to package.

2) Dice bacon and add to pan over medium heat. Cook until it's nice and crispy.

3) Dice leek making sure to rinse well to remove dirt.

4) Prep other ingredients for the dish.

5) Remove crispy bacon from pan. Add leeks to pan with a drizzle of olive oil if the pan is very dry. Cook for a minute or two and add red pepper flakes and garlic. Cook for a minute to soften the veggies.

6) Add bacon back to pan. Drain pasta and stir cooked pasta in with leek and bacon mixture.

7) Drizzle in egg mixture and stir like crazy. Kill the heat on the pan. The heat from the pan and pasta should cook the eggs and thicken the dish.

8) Season with salt and pepper and serve with grated parmesan cheese and chopped parsley.

Making the dish

The good news about this dish is that it takes literally 30 minutes to make, start to finish.

To start, get a large pot of salted water boiling for the pasta. Bowtie pasta takes a bit longer to cook than spaghetti, so definitely get your water going at least.

I like to use a little bacon for this dish and trust me a little goes a long way. Just dice it up into pieces. I used four thick strips for a pound of pasta so it’s really not all that much once it’s in the finished dish.

A little bacon goes a long way

Throw that into a pan and let it start to brown. The crispier the better in my opinion!

Meanwhile, dice up a leek. The important thing to remember about leeks is that they tend to have a lot of dirt in between their layers so chop it in half horizontally and wash it under cold water. You can kind of peel apart the layers a bit to get it nice and clean. Then dice it up!

Pretty straightforward

I like to get everything ready for this recipe because it all comes together really quickly.

These are all the things you’ll need. The chopped parsley is just for finishing the dish.

All you need.

When your bacon is crispy, move it onto a paper towel and then add your leeks to the rendered bacon fat. Oh yea… that’s flavor. You shouldn’t need any additional oil, but if it looks really dry, add a tablespoon of olive oil. I also added a pinch of red pepper flakes just to give it some heat.

After the leeks cook for a minute or two, add your garlic also. You don’t want to completely caramelize these guys, just cook them down a bit until they’re soft.

Just a few minutes

Meanwhile, make sure to have your eggs ready – just lightly beat them!

Sauce of sorts

Once your leeks are cooked, add your bacon back to that pan and stir it all together.

When your pasta is done, drain it and then add the pasta back to the pan over low heat. Now for the fun part. Add your leek/bacon mixture to the pasta and mix everything together.

Then drizzle in your beaten eggs and stir like a banshee! Don’t let the eggs clump together too much or you’ll end up with scrambled egg pasta – not as tasty. The key is to make sure you work quickly after you drain the pasta so it’s still very hot.

This is what you’re going for:

Stir stir stir!

After you add in all your eggs, stir it for a minute to make sure the eggs are cooked all the way and then taste for salt and pepper. The bacon will add some saltiness, but you’ll probably want to hit it with a good pinch of both.

Serve it right away! It’s best with grated Parm cheese and chopped parsley.

Parsley and Parmesan are good things

The dish is actually a lot lighter than it looks. Remember that there is no cream or anything in the dish (although you could add some if you wanted), that’s just from the eggs.

Yummy bite.

This is such a great dish and one that I think anyone can master. It’s perfect for a cold winter night when you don’t have a lot of time.

Give it a shot and get on the carbonara train.