I've not had much luck when it's come to cooking these 15 minute meals in, well, 15 minutes. My unofficial record is probably somewhere just over 15 minutes, but my average is probably hovering around the 25 minute mark (with a couple of anomalies clocking in at an embarrassing 45-ish minutes - curse those sage dumplings). Today I would be stepping things up by attempting to cook this chorizo carbonara during the half time break of a football match I was watching. The stakes were high - I don't like missing the start of the second half. And it would be an important test of the much maligned pasta dishes - could I prove to Lolz finally that they can be cooked as quickly and easily as any other midweek pasta meal?
I got the pasta in the pan - timer set to 10 minutes. In these 10 minutes I would need to prepare the salad (including slicing the clementines, picking the mint leaves and shaving the manchego); prepare the dressing; get the chopped chorizo and chilli into the pan along with the picked rosemary leaves and crushed garlic and prepare the sauce for the pasta (including grating 40g of manchego cheese and juicing the lemon and beating with egg and yoghurt). Needless to say I didn't manage it - sometimes it takes me 10 minutes just to find the garlic crusher. I wasn't too far off, but the timer went off to tell me the pasta was ready at about the time I got the chorizo into the pan.
I got it all plated up at around the 19 minute mark - I missed a few minutes of the second half, but thankfully no game changing events happened in that time. I really liked the pasta - it was probably as good as any other (more calorific) carbonara I have made with a really good spicy kick, and I loved the smoky chorizo that took the place of the more traditional pancetta. The salad was a bit strange though - clementines and cheese together?
Lolz wasn't 100% convinced and gave it 7/10. Difficulty rating 2/10.
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