Autentico

Photo taken in haste before we dug in. I used the chipped plate, sorry!

Today I decided to make proper Italian spaghetti tagliatelle carbonara using my porky souvenir pack of guanciale and the tagliatelle I made from surplus sourdough starter before we went away. I was pretty sure I could get it right given the limited number of ingredients, but I did a bit of googling for guidance on quantities and method.

Well. It was amazing. So different from our run-of-the-mill carbonara, and very like what I had in the restaurant in Turin. That said, we're not going to do it this way every time. Dieters look away now: guanciale is very fatty, at least 50% fat I reckon. You cook it slowly in its own fat in a frying pan till crispy, ending up with a lake of rendered fat. Then you tip the cooked pasta into the frying pan and stir it around thoroughly to make sure that the pasta picks up every last drop of porky, cholesterol-laden fat. It tastes wonderful and is what helps the sauce to cohere and coat the pasta properly. I've blogged it of course, so you can click for the gory details.

In the morning we went to Narbonne yet again to consult Michel at our currently front-running construction company. We ended up spending two hours there as he clicked and dragged to come up with two further possibilities now that our plans have been upended. Neither of them was ideal, but by making some compromises we've ended up with something we can probably live with. We went off to study it in more detail. We are still impatiently waiting for Bossy Lady to show us her revolutionary ideas. I think she's trying to build up suspense.

It's been such a hot day we ended up not doing much in the afternoon after our luxurious lunch. I'm plodding through my book group book -- I'm not going to finish it by Sunday. I was so bored with it I didn't even take it on holiday with me. Oh-- it's The Plot Against America by Philip Roth, aka Everything you never wanted to know about my childhood stamp collection.