If there is one thing I think most people from Western and Westernised countries can agree on is that we have an incredibly wasteful mentality which stems from the seemingly infinite abundance we feel we have. The shops are always in stock, or so they make it look like. In my own culture, on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, we always have lavish feasts with every family bringing food fit for four or five times the amount of people that actually arrive. Many people bring potato salads, pasta salads, and slaw salads. People bring various cuts of meat, warm and cold. And then I am not even talking about the many desserts people bring as well.
The good thing is that most of the time people distribute the food among the families, and we feast on this feast a couple of days afterwards as well.
This afternoon, I looked in the fridge, finding many different cuts of meat that I thought of using. I also found some pasta, olive oil and an egg. And thence the leftover pasta creation that I want to share with you today!
The neat thing about leftovers is that they are already cooked. I basically took some of the cooked meat, and I boiled the pasta. In total, this lunch took me about 20 minutes from start to finish.
This dish is also more technique than recipe. So, if you want to follow along and see how you can basically make any pasta dish your own with only some oil and an egg, please join me as I show you how I made the Leftover Christmas Pasta dish.
Recipe/Ingredients List
For this recipe, I used the least amount of ingredients, especially because most of the ingredients were pre-cooked! You can swap this for anything, from bacon, to shredded meat or substitute meat, or any veggies! I used:
- a couple of tbsps of olive oil,
- one whole egg,
- 1 portion of pasta (about 50-80 grams), and
- various cuts of cold/leftover meat (also about 100 grams).
This was only a single portion, of around medium size.
Method/Process
In my opinion, there are only three techniques to make pasta. If you master these three, you will be able to make any pasta dish your heart desires. The first technique is emulsifying pasta water with oil, the second technique is emulsifying cheese and pasta water, and the third technique is emulsifying egg, cheese, oil, and pasta water.
For this recipe, I only used oil, pasta water, and an egg, which is almost a type of carbonara-style pasta. I did not have any hard cheese on hand, so I did not use any cheese, but the technique remained the same. When adding an egg to pasta, you have to first temper the egg, and then slowly cook it; resulting in a rich, thick, and creamy sauce. Let me show you how I did this!
At first, I cooked my pasta. The pasta water is an essential component to the dish, as it will add starches which will help thicken the sauce, but it will also add salt to the dish, because of the salty pasta water! Be careful to not add too much salt!
While my pasta was cooking, I "flavoured" my oil by heating the cut pieces of meat in the oil. When you cook bacon, you will obviously not add much more oil as the bacon has a lot of fat which you will use.
In any case, I heated the meats in the oil, flavouring the oil, which I will then use to "temper" the egg along with the pasta water.
The next stage, when the pasta is cooked and the meat has been warmed and the oil flavoured, I temper the egg. Tempering the egg basically means to begin to heat the egg slowly without applying direct heat. I could unfortunately not photograph this as I only had my own two hands. But what I essentially did was to slowly add some of the hot pasta water to the egg, making sure to constantly mix with the whisk. I then also add some of the hot oil until I though that the mixture was "tempered" enough.
As the egg mixture was tempered, I added it back to the hot pan, along with the hot pasta. Again, I made sure to constantly mix and agitate the pasta and sauce, as this will prohibit the egg from scrambling. I once ordered pasta carbonara and the sauce had various clumps of cooked egg white in it. According to me, that dish should never have left that professional kitchen! Alas, such is life.
If you do everything correctly, you will be left with this ultra-creamy and velvety smooth sauce. I wanted cheese at this stage so badly, as hard cheeses add a very subtle nutty flavour which missed from this dish. But the result was fantastic nonetheless.
I plated the dish and my girlfriend did the classic girlfriend move. Or I was the weak boyfriend. But I asked her if she wanted some, and she said, "No thanks." I made the cardinal mistake of not making extra. As I asked her if she wanted a taste, she said she actually wanted a plate now! I felt honoured and robbed at the same time.
Jokes aside, plating pastas are always fun and you can make them so beautiful. As I said, I desperately wanted some cheese to grate over the dish, but I had none. Overall, I think the dish came out nice.
It is always sad to see when people throw out perfectly good food, and I though that this pasta dish would be perfect in utilising some of the leftover food.
In any case, I really hope that my post inspired you to either use some leftovers before they go bad, helping reduce food waste, or that I inspired you to try and create some of your own pasta dishes.
I hope that your post-festive weekend has also started out well!
Happy cooking, and keep well.
All of the writings and the recipe used in this post are my own creations. The photographs are also my own, taken with my iPhone.
