I’ve been wanting to try a new recipe for a while, so I found one of my old cook books that had been in storage for over two years, and decided to go with “beautiful zucchini carbonara” from Jamie at Home: Cook Your Way to the Good Life. The attorney in me is a little leery of copying the recipe on here, but you can find it word for word at Jamie Oliver’s website, here. FYI, “courgette” means zucchini but in British ;)

My phone takes awful, non-focused pictures so it almost seems pointless to post them….almost.

I started by prepping the fresh thyme…and I’m glad I did because that took freaking forever.  Have you every de-leafed fresh thyme??  Not sure it’s worth it…but anywhoo, I’m glad I did that before I got anything cooking.  I then cut the bacon and placed that in a bowl, ready to go (side note: I live and die by “prepping” and having bowls with all my ingredients measured out and ready to go, it reduces my amount of anxiety once I start cooking, just to know that things are ready to go when I need them).

After that I followed the directions step by step.  Do you know what the most beautiful kitchen smell is?

Yep, bacon.  Soooo good.

Loooooooking good!  At this point my pasta was already done, and the recipe says the zucchini and pasta should end at about the same time.  So either I was slow in getting the zucchini in the pan (which is possible), or the pasta cooked faster than expected.  Either way, I think next time I make this I will wait to get the pasta cooking until after I cut the zucchini or once I get the bacon going.

Mmmmmm-mmmmm! Not gonna lie, this turned out pretty great.  A couple things: since my pasta finished cooking early I drained it and completely forgot to keep some of the pasta water.  I didn’t want to use just plain, flavorless water (not sure that pasta water really has much “flavor,” but anyhoot…), so I compensated by throwing in a little canned chicken broth.  Another thing was that I thought there was too much pasta, so I only used about 3/4 of it.  Although it turned out delicious, it was a bit rich for me towards the end, which I think is either because I didn’t use enough “pasta water” to lighten it, or the chicken broth was a bit much to use instead of pasta water.  I’ll have to try out a couple different things the next time I make this, but it was definitely good and definitely worth making again!  And surprisingly, not too difficult to make :)

Buen provecho!