Carbonara

Still got the L-plates up... though trying to keep the instructor on her side of the car was the toughest job. Mixing metaphors, yellow and red cards were flying about like confetti.

An egg and an egg yoke, parmesan, cream - the sauce. 4xrashers, mushrooms, garlic - the meat! Pasta - the base. Olive oil, butter, salt, pepper - the essentials. Water - for the pasta... and and and to moisten things while cooking slowly, rather than using too much oil or butter (that was a new one on me).

'O, you do know how...' was the surprised reaction I got when I separated the egg yolk from its white - back and forth between the two halves of the broken shell, letting the yolk drip away. It wasn't off the stones I licked it.

The sauce is most important bit, but I'm not quite sure how to explain it. I beat the egg and egg yolk lightly in a bowl, and then grated in the parmesan cheese, mixing in small dollops of cream as I went, until I had a light yellow, slightly thinkened sauce. Not very exact, but that's the fun and mystique.

Cook the meat (rashers, mushrooms, garlic) for about 10 minutes on a lowish heat, and add the sauce at a very low heat... at one stage, I thought I had a disaster on my hands, the cheese was starting to curdle, because in fact I had started out with a high heat to cook the rashers cripy. But I took the pan off the heat entirely and added more cream. The control over heat is where cooking with gas wins over electricity.