Last month I finished reading the trilogy of Ruth Reichl’s food novels.  The first book in the series,”Comfort Me With Apples”, includes a vivid tale of Pasta Carbonara and in true Reichl style the recipe is included among her prose.  Yesterday I started reading the wildly popular “Eat Drink Pray” by Elizabeth Gilbert.  I’ve seen a tremendous amount of people, mostly women, reading this book in coffee shops and airports so I asked Aaron to bring home a used copy from his work.  Pasta Carbonara is the first dish Gilbert eats in Rome and it launches a four month excursion into Italian digestible delights.

Tonight I made Pasta Carbonara for the first time. 

This will not ignite a four month joy ride into gluttony but I’m so glad I splurged on this dish.  I’ve devloped a small obsession with hot carbohydrates that cook sunny raw egg yolks.  The Korean Bi-Bim-Bap is a great example of this terrific technique.

Update: I wrote this immediately after consuming the Pasta Carbonara.  A few short hours later my significant other and I were NOT pleased about this dish.  It made us ill, very very ill.  I’m not sure what happened.  Perhaps we are not accustom to the gluttonous conxumption of bacon, or perhaps the illness was unrelated (doubtful). My best guess is that the raw egg is the culprit.  Thank goodness my siginificat other has a sense of humor about these things!  I used a recipe from a rescpected food blog.  However, over the past month I’ve been quite dissapointed by some of the food blog recipes that I have tried.  I now plan to peruse the food blogs that I love but I will only prepare edited and tested recipes from published cook books or magazines.