Pear and Blue Cheese Carbonara

What a fun little dish. It took just as long to prepare as to boil the pasta and turned out to be quite a looker; and quite tasty.

After we got a pot of water for a pound of fettuccine going, we separated 5 egg yolks into a big bowl. (Here is by the way a link to our ideas about cooking pasta.)

We mixed them up with  3 tablespoons of creme fraiche and some salt and pepper.

Then we got out our blue cheese. The recipe called for a Stilton, but we happened to come across a quite mild one, called Himmel Bla at Trader Joe's, which turned out a good choice.

We crumbled 150g of the blue cheese into the sauce.

Then we diced up leaves of 3 sticks of rosemary, 2 cloves of garlic, and 8 slices of bacon. Then we quartered, cored, and slice up 2 pears.

We first fried up the bacon in a pat of butter and little olive oil till it was nice an crispy. Then we added the herbs and fruit for just a couple of minutes.

We also washed a handful of rocket lettuce and squeezed the juice of 1 lemon.

The timing had to be just right. As soon as the pasta was just perfectly al dente we drained it, retained some of the coking water, and mixed them with the sauce, bacon, herbs and fruit, as well as the lemon juice. We quickly added some of the water to it all to make it all silky; before turning into scrambled eggs.

We served it with the rocket lettuce. Doesn't it look darling? The pears and lemon juice gave the carbonara an expert sweetness. All thumbs up.

(We got the idea for this out of a dogeared Jamie Oliver magazine, translated into German.)